
class HHum. 

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The Industrial Problem 



Being the William Levi Bull 
Lectures for the Year 1905 



BY 
LYMAN ABBOTT 

Author of " Christianity and Social Prob- 
lems" " Evolution of Christianity" etc. 




PHILADELPHIA 

GEORGE W. JACOBS & CO. 

PUBLISHERS 



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[LIBRARY or S0NQ8ESS 
; Two Copies riscsiytU 

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Copyright, 1905, by 

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Published May, /goj 





The Letter Establishing the Lectureship 

Bishop Whitaker presented the Letter of Endowment of the 
Lectureship on Christian Sociology from Rev. William L. 
Bull as follows : 

For many years it has been my earnest desire to found a 
Lectureship on Christian Sociology, meaning thereby the 
application of Christian principles to the Social, Industrial, 
and Economic problems of the time, in my Alma Mater, the 
Philadelphia Divinity School. My object in founding this 
Lectureship is to secure the free, frank, and full consideration 
of these subjects, with special reference to the Christian 
aspects of the question involved, which have heretofore, in 
my opinion, been too much neglected in such discussion. 
It would seem that the time is now ripe and the moment an 
auspicious one for the establishment of this Lectureship, at 
least tentatively. 

After a trial of three years, I again make the offer, as in 
my letter of January i , 1 90 1 , to continue these Lectures 
for a period of three years, with the hope that they may 
excite such an interest, particularly among the undergraduates 
of the Divinity School, that I shall be justified, with the ap- 
proval of the authorities of the Divinity School, in placing 
the Lectureship on a more permanent foundation. 

I herewith pledge myself to contribute the sum of six 
hundred dollars annually, for a period of three years, to the 
payment of a lecturer on Christian Sociology, whose duty it 
shall be to deliver a course of not less than four lectures to 
the students of the Divinity School, either at the school or 



elsewhere, as may be deemed most advisable, on the appli- 
cation of Christian principles to the Social, Industrial, and 
Economic problems and needs of the times ; the said lecturer 
to be appointed annually by a committee of five members : 
the Bishop of the Diocese of Pennsylvania ; the Dean of the 
Divinity School ; a member of the Board of Overseers, who 
shall at the same time be an Alumnus ; and two others, one 
of whom shall be myself and the other chosen by the pre- 
ceding four members of the committee. 

Furthermore, if it shall be deemed desirable that the Lec- 
tures shall be published, I pledge myself to the additional 
payment of from one to two hundred dollars for such purpose. 

To secure a full, frank, and free consideration of the ques- 
tions involved, it is my desire that the opportunity shall be 
given from time to time to the representatives of each school 
of economic thought to express their views in these Lectures. 

The only restriction I wish placed on the lecturer is that 
he shall be a believer in the moral teachings and principles 
of the Christian Religion as the true solvent of our Social, 
Industrial, and Economic problems. Of course, it is my 
intention that a new lecturer shall be appointed by the com- 
mittee each year, who shall deliver the course of Lectures for 
the ensuing year. 

WILLIAM LEVI BULL. 



PREFACE 

From 1870, when I took up my residence 
in Cornwall-on-the-Hudson, to 1887, when I 
assumed the pastorate of Plymouth Church, 
Brooklyn, I was engaged in two courses of 
study : one in the New Testament in prepa- 
ration for a Commentary on that Book ; the 
other on our industrial and sociological prob- 
lems, impelled thereto by the journalistic 
duty of reporting and interpreting the inci- 
dents in our current American history. The 
result of that study was an early conviction 
that the principles of the Manchester School 
of Political Economy, which had dominated 
academic instruction in my college days, as 
they were commonly understood and prac- 
tically applied, could not be reconciled with 
either the principles or the spirit inculcated 
by Jesus Christ. To apply those principles 
to the solution of our industrial problems 
became my endeavor, which has now been 



6 Preface 

pursued as a life purpose for upwards of a 
quarter of a century. In an appendix to 
this volume is given a list of some of the 
principal books which have entered into 
this course of study ; but more important 
has been the study of that problem at first 
hand, — in the investigation of specific inci- 
dents and events in our industrial develop- 
ment, in visits to mines, factories, and other 
organized industries, and in conferences 
with both labor leaders and captains of in- 
dustry. When in 1904 I was invited to 
give this course of Lectures on the condi- 
tions expressed in the letter establishing 
this Lectureship, the invitation was gladly 
accepted because it furnished an opportu- 
nity to put into a compact form some of the 
conclusions which had been reached as a 
result of my faith " in the moral teachings 
and principles of the Christian religion as 
the true solvent of our Social, Industrial 
and Economic problems/ ' The American 
community is slowly coming to the conclu- 
sion that universal suffrage is no solvent of 



Preface 7 

our political problems unless it is accom- 
panied by a universal education which 
must be moral as well as intellectual. It is 
also slowly coming to the conclusion that 
industrial liberty is no solvent of our eco- 
nomic problems unless it is accompanied by 
a recognition of economic duties and obli- 
gations. This too tardy rediscovery of the 
essential teaching of Jesus Christ makes 
this beginning of the twentieth century far 
more full of hope for industrial peace and 
prosperity than was the beginning of the 
nineteenth, with its calm assurance that 
educated self-interest would prove a panacea 
for all industrial evils. 

This brief statement sufficiently explains 
the genesis of this volume, the object of 
which is to indicate certain lessons which 
the industrial evolution of the last half 
century has to teach us in the light of the 
precepts and principles inculcated by Jesus 
Christ. 

Lyman Abbott. 

Cornwall-on-tke-Hudson, N. Y., 
May, igoj. 



CONTENTS 

I. The Industrial Problem ... 11 

II. The Political Solution — REGU- 
LATION . 57 

III. The Economic Solution — Reor- 

GANIZATION 113 

IV. The Ethical Solution — Regen- 

eration 159 



I 

THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM 



THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM 

You are to be congratulated, young gen- 
tlemen, on the fact that you are entering 
upon your ministry at a time when theo- 
logical seminaries recognize two principles : 
first, that there is no Christianity which is 
not applied Christianity ; and secondly, 
that Christianity is social as well as indi- 
vidual, — that is, it aims at the reconstruc- 
tion of society as well as the regeneration 
of the individual. 

Christ began His ministry by preaching 
the Kingdom of God, and a kingdom is an 
organization. The Apostle, in his Apoca- 
lyptic vision, saw the time when the king- 
doms of this world should become the king- 
doms of our Lord and of His Christ. To ac- 
complish such a transformation is the pur- 
pose of the Christian ministry. The indus- 



14 The Industrial Problem 

trial problem, viewed from the Christian 
point of view, is simply this : How shall 
our industries be put upon a Christian basis, 
organized according to the principles which 
Jesus Christ inculcated, and permeated by 
His spirit? We are not, in these hours, 
turning aside from your strictly professional 
course to something of secondary impor- 
tance ; it is not in this spirit that we are to 
approach this theme. It is essential, cen- 
tral, vital, to your ministry. The question 
which we are to consider is not primarily 
industrial or economic ; it is human, Chris- 
tian, profoundly religious. 

You will not expect me to offer to you a 
solution of the industrial problem; cer- 
tainly that is not my purpose, nor even my 
desire. I wish in these four lectures to de- 
fine that problem, to apply to it in certain 
of its aspects the principles and precepts in- 
culcated by Jesus Christ, and so to indicate 
the direction in which you are in your min- 
istry to look and labor for its ultimate solu- 
tion. In the first lecture I shall endeavor 



The Industrial Problem 15 

to put the problem before you and to indi- 
cate one direction in which society is looking 
for a solution, and will look in vain. In 
the other three lectures I shall endeavor to 
indicate the direction in which we are to 
look for the solution of this problem 
through, respectively, political administra- 
tion, industrial reorganization, and religious 
inspiration. 

In 1894 Herbert Spencer wrote to Mr. 
James A. Skilton, of Brooklyn, a letter on 
the industrial situation, which was pub- 
lished in the Brooklyn Eagle in the same 
year. The letter is as follows : 

Fairfield, Pewsey, Wilt, May 28 y 189 A. 
Dear Mr. Skilton : 

I believe I wished you good-speed in 
your enterprise, but I believe your enter- 
prise is futile. In the United States, as here 
and elsewhere, the movement toward disso- 
lution of existing social forms and reorgan- 
ization on a socialistic basis I believe to be 
irresistible. We have bad times before us 
and you have still more dreadful times be- 



16 The Industrial Problem 

fore you — civil war, immense bloodshed, 
and eventually military despotism of the 
severest type. 

Truly yours, 

Herbert Spencer. 

Such a letter from such a student of life 
must be taken seriously. His apprehen- 
sions may not be well-founded, but they are 
not to be carelessly disregarded. I believe 
he is right in saying that there is going on 
in our time a movement toward the disso- 
lution of existing forms and a reorganiza- 
tion on what may perhaps be not unfitly 
termed a socialistic basis, and that this 
movement is irresistible. I do not believe 
that this movement threatens civil war, im- 
mense bloodshed, and eventually military 
despotism. I believe, on the contrary, that 
it has in it the promise of an industrial 
prosperity and an intellectual, social, and 
spiritual development far transcending any 
that past history has afforded. It is a 
movement accompanied with serious evils, 
but is essentially beneficent and in accord- 



The Industrial Problem 17 

ance with that law of evolution which, per- 
haps, no one has better defined than Mr. 
Spencer, — a movement from a simpler to a 
more complex, and from a lower to a higher, 
state of society. 

Historically, the family is the unit out of 
which society is composed, the cell from 
which by constant reduplication the social 
organism is created ; it is the earliest or- 
ganization, and the progenitor of all other 
organizations. In primitive society, as 
seen, for instance, in the portraiture of the 
patriarchal age given to us in the Book of 
Genesis, the family is the state and the 
father is its head. He is absolute monarch 
— legislator, governor, judge ; he enacts the 
laws, interprets the laws, enforces the laws. 
The family is the army ; in case of war the 
father acts as commander-in-chief, and leads 
forth to battle his sons and his servants. 
The family is the church ; the father is the 
priest and sets up the altar and conducts the 
worship. The family is the industrial 
organism ; the father directs the industries, 



18 The Industrial Problem 

takes the proceeds, and distributes them as 
he judges best among the members of his 
little community. 

Gradually both differentiation and en- 
largement of the organization take place. 
Two or three families, or more, unite for the 
purpose of offensive or defensive warfare 
and the tribe is formed. Because of his 
age, his experience, or his character, the 
father of one of the families becomes the 
chief of the tribe, — its ruler in peace, its 
commander-in-chief in battle. The fami- 
lies unite in a common worship, and a priest 
or priests are appointed to conduct this tribal 
worship, and, that they may the better con- 
duct their sacred duties, they are excused 
from military service. Industry is or- 
ganized ; certain phases of manual labor 
are assigned to the women, certain others to 
the men. Henceforth the complicated proc- 
ess of growth is traceable in separated 
departments, — military, political, religious, 
and industrial. 

The families have been merged into a 



The Industrial Problem 19 

tribe, and eventually the tribes are merged 
into a nation, first for military purposes, to 
defend the community from attack or to 
give it greater power in wars of conquest. 
The organization is primarily military ; it is 
therefore necessarily despotic, for war can be 
carried on only by a despotic authority. 
There is an appearance, but no reality, of 
unity ; the unity is formal, not vital ; there 
are not a hundred thousand wills united 
in a common purpose, but a hundred thou- 
sand persons executing the will of one per- 
son ; not a hundred thousand minds, seeing, 
thinking, planning harmoniously, but a 
hundred thousand persons not thinking at 
all, but doing without thought what one 
person has planned. 

With the development of the individual 
man it becomes increasingly difficult to 
maintain this subordination of the all to the 
one, or of the many to the one. The indi- 
vidual begins to think, the individual will 
to assert itself. Out of this grow meetings 
for public discussion, with resultant assent 



20 The Industrial Problem 

or dissent; and eventually some form of 
legislative body comes into existence to 
express the thoughts and the resolves of the 
many. This process is taking place under 
our eyes at the present time in Russia. 
For forty years the Russians, in their 
zemstvos, or provincial assemblies, have been 
unconsciously training themselves to think 
their own thoughts and form their own 
plans respecting the common welfare ; and 
after forty years of this training they are 
beginning to demand, with increasing 
urgency, the right to have some share in 
thinking national thoughts, and forming 
the national purpose. Gradually, as the 
natural result of such development of the 
individual life and such demand for par- 
ticipation in national actions, the govern- 
ment is differentiated into three depart- 
ments : the legislative, the judicial, and the 
executive. The people begin to think 
harmoniously, — hence the legislative ; their 
sense of justice begins to develop and they 
begin to agree in their conscience, — hence 



The Industrial Problem 21 

the judicial ; they begin truly to act to- 
gether, to carry out what they have 
planned, to realize in national acts the 
decision of the national conscience, — hence 
the executive. Thus the nation is organ- 
ized ; cooperation and combination take the 
place of unquestioning subjection to one 
supreme, all-powerful will. 

This progress toward political organi- 
zation is also progress toward individual 
liberty and individual development. The 
notion of Rousseau that man in a state of 
nature was in a state of liberty, and that he 
voluntarily sacrificed some of his liberty to 
obtain the benefits of civilization, is con- 
tradicted by history. Liberty and organ- 
ization have gone on together. The most 
primitive of modern governments is that of 
Russia ; it retains in its autocracy the form 
of the family ; the Czar is the father of his 
people and nominally enacts their laws, in- 
terprets and applies them, and executes them 
as interpreted ; and Russia is the country 
in which there is the least independent 



22 The Industrial Problem 

thinking and the least individual liberty. 
America, on the other hand, is, of all 
modern countries, the one most highly 
organized. Its individuals are organized 
in towns and counties, its towns and 
counties in states, its states in a great 
nationality ; and America is, of all modern 
countries, the one in which the individual 
has the largest liberty, the greatest power 
of initiative, and the fullest development. 
Nowhere is the merging of the individual 
opinion into a public opinion, nowhere the 
cooperation of the individual will in the 
public will, carried to such an extent as in 
America, and nowhere is the individual 
mind so developed, and the individual will 
so free. In the political sphere, organ- 
ization and individual will are not an- 
tagonistic. They are concurrent, they 
promote each other : the freer the indi- 
vidual the better is the organization ; the 
more perfect the organization, the freer is 
the individual. 

We may trace a similar concurrent de- 



The Industrial Problem 23 

velopment of organization and liberty in 
the sphere of religion. First, there are 
separate gods for each tribe and for each 
family in the tribe. Sometimes these 
separate religions live side by side without 
intermingling ; more often the men of the m 
one religion prohibit and attempt to destroy 
the other religion by fire and sword. The 
result is uniformity but not unity. Uni- 
formity is imposed from without ; unity is 
developed from within. They are not only 
not the same, they are antagonistic ; they 
cannot even coexist in the same com- 
munity. Under religious uniformity, as 
under political uniformity, the people do 
not think, they do not will. They accept 
the thoughts which their priests impose 
upon them and render the services which 
their priests require of them. As they 
begin to think and to will in the sphere 
of religion, they think different religious 
thoughts, and demand, for the expression 
of their life, different religious rituals. 
Sectarianism is the result ; but as the peo- 



24 The Industrial Problem 

pie think more profoundly they discover a 
unity of faith beneath the various forms of 
expression, and as their religious purposes 
become more unselfish and more spiritual, 
they find themselves animated by a com- 
mon will, and working toward a common 
end. Uniformity has disappeared ; unity 
is taking its place. There is more uni- 
formity in Romanism than in Protestant- 
ism ; there is more unity in Protestantism 
than in Romanism. 

The same process of differentiation and 
organization, of social order concurrent 
with individual development, which can 
thus be traced in the political and religious 
history of mankind, can equally be traced 
in its industrial history. 

In the primitive state each individual 
himself conducts all forms of industry 
necessary for his comfort. He kills the 
game, skins it, makes of the skins moc- 
casins for his feet and a cloak for his body, 
digs out the log to serve for a canoe, erects 
his wigwam, cultivates his little patch of 



The Industrial Problem 25 

corn, makes and strings his own bow and 
fashions his own arrows ; is, in short, 
butcher, tanner, shoemaker, tailor, boat- 
builder, house carpenter, farmer, armorer, 
all in one. This is individualism, pure and 
simple. 

Gradually he learns that he is more skil- 
ful in the chase than his neighbor, and that 
his neighbor can make a better bow and 
arrow than he. So one stays at home to 
construct, the other goes forth to hunt, and 
the two exchange their products to mutual 
advantage. As this exchange of products 
becomes more extensive and complicated, a 
medium for the exchange is invented, 
and thus money comes into use and bar- 
ter becomes trade. It is discovered that 
different communities have different ad- 
vantages in soil and climate, or in the taste 
and temper of the people ; so communities 
as well as individuals begin to exchange, 
and trade becomes commerce. Steam is 
discovered and machinery invented. With 
steam and machinery comes a necessity for 



26 The Industrial Problem 

a larger industrial organization. Combina- 
tion of capital is now required. Capital is 
what a man makes by his industry more 
than he consumes in his support or his 
pleasures. When the individual housewife 
spins the wool and weaves it in her loom 
into a homespun garment, a single man in 
a single lifetime can easily accumulate the 
capital necessary for such household indus- 
try. But when a thousand spindles are re- 
volving and a hundred looms are clanking 
under a single roof, one man cannot in a 
lifetime accumulate the capital for such a 
manufacturing industry. Various individ- 
uals must combine their savings. Thus 
first the partnership, and subsequently the 
corporation, is created. 

A corporation is at once the creation and 
the agent of democracy. It is a combina- 
tion by which men and women unite their 
savings to accomplish by united action 
what it would be impossible to accomplish 
by individual action. Each individual 
contributes something to a common fund, 



The Industrial Problem 27 

and this common fund is managed by a 
man or a body of men selected by the con- 
tributors to act as their servant in the ad- 
ministration of the common fund for the 
common benefit. It is true that this sen- 
tence describes the ideal, and that the 
actual does not always conform to it. 
Sometimes the man or body of men elected 
by the contributors so manage the property 
as to rob the contributors and take the 
property themselves. Sometimes they man- 
age it so as to give to the contributors the 
least possible share of the profits and secure 
the largest possible share for themselves. 
But, in the vast majority of cases, they 
manage it with substantial honesty, and 
divide the profits of a common enterprise 
with substantial equity among those who 
have made that enterprise possible. The 
existence of the corporation is itself a wit- 
ness to the ethical development of the com- 
munity in which the corporation exists, for 
it cannot exist until moral character has so 
developed that it is relatively safe for thou- 



28 The Industrial Problem 

sands of men and women to intrust their 
earnings to the uncontrolled management 
of a few financiers of ability. A corpora- 
tion in the modern sense of that term was 
an ethical impossibility in pagan Greece or 
Rome. There was no basis of common 
honesty, and therefore none of common 
trust and confidence, on which such an 
organization could be founded. The exist- 
ence of corporations is a testimony to the 
high development of standards of honesty 
in the community and of mutuality of trust 
and confidence growing out of such moral 
developments. 

If such corporations did not exist, our 
industrial civilization would be impossi- 
ble. The bank, the factory, the mine, the 
railroad, the steamship, are all products 
of combinations of capital, — that is, of in- 
dividual earnings united for carrying on a 
common enterprise. If it were possible to 
destroy corporations we should have to in- 
vest the accumulations of our industry, as 
men did in the time of Christ, in clothing 



The Industrial Problem 29 

and utensils which moth and rust corrupt, 
or bury them in the ground, where thieves 
break through and steal. The wheels of 
our factories would cease to revolve, the 
precious metals would lie unused in the 
ground, the ocean would become an im- 
passable barrier between the continents, and 
we should revert to the horse as our only 
means of locomotion. To destroy the com- 
binations of capital would be to destroy 
our civilization. 

Organized labor is equally essential to 
modern civilization. When a single house- 
wife spins and weaves the wool, no organ- 
ized industry is necessary ; she spins and 
weaves as she likes, and as her other duties 
permit. But when five hundred spinners 
and weavers work together under one roof, 
and for a widely-extended market, the 
housewife's liberty of industrial action is 
no longer possible. These five hundred 
workers must work together ; the number 
of spinners and the number of weavers 
must be correctly proportioned ; the hours 



30 The Industrial Problem 

of labor for each worker must be adjusted 
with reference to the hours of labor for all. 
They must work under the same roof, 
breathing the same air, submitting to the 
same conditions. The organization of labor 
is as necessary to the existence of a factory 
as is the organization of capital. This 
necessity of labor organization is perhaps 
even more strikingly illustrated by the rail- 
road. The transportation of freight and 
passengers from New York to Philadelphia 
cannot be managed as the transportation 
of vegetables from the market garden to the 
Philadelphia market in the farmer's wagon. 
He brings in the produce on Monday, sends 
it in by his son on Tuesday, and stays at 
home on Wednesday. It would not be 
possible to carry on a railroad by such a 
method, and leave the engineer, conductor, 
and brakeman to settle among themselves 
what days they would serve, and in what 
capacity. 

The question is sometimes discussed by 
the newspapers, Are labor organizations 



The Industrial Problem 31 

desirable ? This question has no existence ; 
it is not real ; it does not exist outside the 
columns of newspapers. Labor organiza- 
tions are indispensable to modern life. 
There could be neither banks, nor factories, 
nor mining, nor railroads, nor steamships, 
without organization of the labor which 
carries them on. The real question is not, 
Shall labor organizations exist? but, Shall 
they be autocratic or democratic ? That is, 
Shall they be organized under capital and 
wholly subject to its will ; or shall they 
have something to say respecting the form, 
nature, and spirit of the organization? 
Shall laborers work under the conditions 
which capital prescribes, during the hours 
which capital requires, for the wages which 
capital chooses to pay, or shall they have a 
voice in determining the conditions, the 
wages, the hours ? 

This is the first and the fundamental 
question involved in our industrial prob- 
lem. Are the mine, the factory, the rail- 
road, private enterprises, owned by capi- 



32 The Industrial Problem 

talists, to be controlled, directed, adminis- 
tered by capitalists, who buy their labor as 
they buy their machinery, and discharge 
the one as they discard the other when it 
ceases to be profitable ? This is one view. 
Are the mine, the railroad, the factory, joint- 
stock enterprises, to be carried on by cap- 
italists and laborers as quasi partners, who 
share the control and the profits, neither 
being independent of the other, each fulfill- 
ing an appropriate function in a harmo- 
nious organization, for mutual profit, and in- 
spired by a spirit of mutual respect ? This is 
the other view. Which of the two is more 
in harmony with the principles of democ- 
racy ? To ask this question is to answer it. 
Whatever may be said of the Old World, in 
the New, where the plain people control the 
government of city, state, and nation, where 
they direct and administer the public edu- 
cation, where they are the final authority 
in their ecclesiastical institutions, it is not 
possible that they will permanently consent 
to a system which allows them no voice in 



The Industrial Problem 33 

their industrial organizations. The country 
which is democratic in politics, education, 
and religion will not be autocratic in in- 
dustry. 

The arguments against the organization 
of labor are plausible but not sound ; they 
are derived from an observation of super- 
ficial incidents, not from a study of funda- 
mental principles. " Labor unions are ir- 
responsible organizations.' ' I doubt the 
truth of the statement; I am inclined to 
believe that in law a labor union is nothing 
but a great partnership in which every 
member is personally responsible for all the 
pecuniary obligations of the organization. 
But if it were otherwise the remedy would 
be incorporation, not dissolution. "They 
cause strikes." On the contrary, they have 
reduced strikes ; it would be more true to 
say that, historically, unions have grown 
out of strikes than that strikes have grown 
out of unions. " They break contracts/ ' 
Sometimes ; but on the whole they have 
kept their agreements quite as loyally as 



34 The Industrial Problem 

capitalistic organizations. " They violate 
the law." Then punish them ; no one pro- 
poses to dispense with combinations of capi- 
tal because in some cases they have violated 
law, in more cases have evaded it, and not 
infrequently have corrupted it at its spring 
and source. " They are led by bosses and 
demagogues." So have political organiza- 
tions been led by bosses and demagogues ; 
vicious leaders are more apparent in politics 
than in industry, and are not wholly absent 
from the churches. What then ? We will 
get rid of them ; we will not take the coun- 
sel of the anarchists and dissolve society 
into its original elements. " They destroy 
individual action. Good laborer and poor 
laborer are paid the same wage; and both 
follow the dictation of their walking dele- 
gate." No doubt this participation on equal 
terms of the profits of combined labor is some- 
times carried too far ; but it is not wholly 
an evil. The shrewd business man and the 
unbusinesslike widow invest their earnings 
in the same company and both get the same 



The Industrial Problem 35 

interest on their investment. Both leave 
their capital at the absolute disposal of 
trusted directors. For they have learned 
that in combination under chosen leaders 
both get an advantage which neither could 
get acting alone. The skilful and the less 
skilful laborer, acting on the same princi- 
ple, unite and put their labor in the control 
of chosen leaders, because they believe that 
by combination both can get an advantage 
which neither can get if he acts separately. 
And they are right. In those industries in 
which labor is disorganized, the labor con- 
ditions are bad, the hours are long, the 
wages are poor. With rare, if any, excep- 
tions, the organization of labor has been fol- 
lowed by improved conditions, lessened 
hours, better wages. 

I have taken longer time than might 
seem necessary to trace the process by 
which we have arrived at the present com- 
plex organizations of capital and labor, be- 
cause there still seem to be many persons 
who imagine that such organization is an 



36 The Industrial Problem 

evil to be avoided, or at least that the tend- 
ency toward such organization is one to be 
dreaded, and if possible, stopped. They 
wish to return to the industrial individual- 
ism of the past, or, if that is impossible, at 
least to prevent any further progress toward 
industrial organization in the future. This 
seems to be the attitude of Herbert Spencer 
in the letter which I have quoted. He 
dreads the movement toward a dissolution 
of existing social forms and a reorganiza- 
tion on a socialistic basis, though he be- 
lieves it to be irresistible. If I have traced 
aright the history of that movement, it is a 
movement toward greater economic well- 
being, more efficient productive industry, 
larger individual liberty, better individual 
development, and a more coherent and a 
more fraternal social order. 

Whatever evils grow out of the despotism 
of capitalistic organization on the one hand 
and the despotism of labor organizations on 
the other, they are not to be corrected by the 
endeavor to return to the industrial individ- 



The Industrial Problem 37 

ualisrn from which we have emerged. All 
such attempt to revert to industrial individ- 
ualism, or to prevent further progress toward 
industrial combination and cooperation, is 
in vain, and worse than in vain. We 
could not do it if we would, and we should 
not do it if we could. 

We could not if we would. Combina- 
tion, both of property and of industry, of 
capital and of labor, is inevitable because it 
is the divine order of human development. 
It would be no more possible to go back to 
the individualistic industry of the first part 
of the nineteenth century than to go back 
to the feudalism that preceded it. To do so 
we should have to forget the invention of 
machinery, the discovery of steam, the 
utilization of electricity, the division of 
labor, the art of cooperation. The world 
will not and ought not to forget the 
economic benefits which cooperation and 
combination have brought to it. 

But even if we could retrace our steps 
we ought not to do so, for to retrace them 



38 The Industrial Problem 

would be to go back toward moral as well 
as toward industrial barbarism. The philos- 
ophy of individualism which the world is 
laying aside to adopt what Herbert Spencer 
calls a socialistic basis, is variously termed 
individual industrialism, from its essential 
nature ; the School of Manchester, from the 
city in England where it is supposed to 
have been born ; and Laissez faire, from its 
proposed panacea for all industrial evils, 
namely, that government should let indus- 
try alone, leaving it to the operation of nat- 
ural law. I believe this philosophy of indi- 
vidual industrialism to be false scientifically, 
false economically, false industrially, false 
ethically. I believe that it was founded on 
a false philosophy of life ; that it assumed 
a false economic postulate ; that it involved 
intolerable industrial evils, and inflicted 
serious and continuous moral degradation 
both upon society and upon the individual. 
Individual industrialism was false scien- 
tifically. Its philosophy is thus defined by 
Adam Smith : 



The Industrial Problem 39 

"All systems either of preference or of 
restraint, therefore, being completely taken 
away, the obvious and simple system of 
natural liberty establishes itself of its own 
accord. Every man, as long as he does not 
violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly 
free to pursue his own interest in his own 
way, and to bring both his industry and 
capital into competition with those of any 
other man, or order of men. The sovereign 
is completely discharged from a duty, in the 
attempting to perform which he must 
always be exposed to innumerable delusions, 
and for the proper performance of which no 
human wisdom or knowledge could ever be 
sufficient, — the duty of superintending the 
industry of private people, and of directing 
it toward the employments most suitable to 
the interests of the society. According to 
the system of natural liberty, the sovereign 
has only three duties to attend to, — three 
duties of great importance, indeed, but 
plain and intelligible to common under- 
standings : First, the duty of protecting the 
society from the violence and invasion of 
other independent societies ; secondl} 7 , the 
duty of protecting, as far as possible, every 



40 The Industrial Problem 

member of the society from the injustice or 
oppression of every other member of it, or 
the duty of establishing an exact adminis- 
tration of justice ; and, thirdly, the duty of 
erecting and maintaining certain public 
works and certain public institutions, which 
it can never be for the interest of any in- 
dividual, or small number of individuals, 
to erect or maintain, because the profit 
could never repay the expense to any in- 
dividual or small number of individuals, 
though it may frequently do much more 
than repay it to a great society/' 1 

This system assumed that free competi- 
tion of selfish interests would bring about 
peace, order, and justice. Labor was re- 
garded as a commodity to be sold in the 
open market. It was held that the labor- 
ers, desiring to secure employment, would 
underbid each other ; the capitalists, desir- 
ing to secure labor, would overbid each 
other ; and in the strife which would ensue, 
the better workman would be paid the bet- 
ter wages, and the more skilful capitalist 

1 Adam Smith: " The Wealth of Nations," Book iv, Chap, ix, 
p. 545. 



The Industrial Problem 41 

would be able to pay the better wages. In 
this struggle the best men would get the 
best results ; society would get the best serv- 
ice ; and while absolute justice would not 
be attained, an approximation to equal jus- 
tice would be secured. This was the phi- 
losophy. It was the industrial application 
of the principle, the struggle for existence, 
the survival of the fittest. But Henry 
Drummond has shown conclusively that 
the struggle for existence, the survival of 
the fittest, is not the law of life. It is only 
one of the laws of life. Of equal force with 
that law is the " struggle for others, " that 
the unfitter may survive. This law is seen 
in operation from the division of the pri- 
mary cell, in the very beginnings of growth, 
up to the act of the mother laying down 
her life for the child she nurses. A mere 
selfish struggle for existence with indiffer- 
ence toward the weak, the poor, and the in- 
efficient, does not promote life ; it is de- 
structive of life. Individual industrialism 
provided only for such a struggle. It not 



42 The Industrial Problem 

only did not encourage any cooperation by 
which the strong would help the weak, the 
rich would help the poor, the wise would 
help the ignorant, — it discouraged such 
help. It went far to prevent it. 

As individual industrialism is scientific- 
ally false, so it is economically false. Its 
assumption that labor is a commodity and 
that the relation between the laborer and 
the capitalist is one between a vendor 
and a purchaser was a false assumption. 
Labor is not a commodity. It is not a 
thing. It is a phase of life. The laborer 
has not some material thing to sell, he has a 
service to render. The relation between the 
laborer and the capitalist is not that be- 
tween the vendor and the purchaser of an 
article, it is that between partners engaged 
in prosecuting a common enterprise. The 
distinction is perfectly clear and very fun- 
damental. If a man wishes to buy a 
horse of mine, it is not of the least conse- 
quence, economically speaking, whether we 
are friends or enemies ; whether, after he 



The Industrial Problem 43 

buys my horse, he and I are on speaking 
terms or not. But if I wish to hire a man 
as my gardener, it is of the utmost impor- 
tance that we should be on amicable terms, 
that we should be able to get along with 
each other. In the first case, there is one 
completed transaction. When I have de- 
livered the horse and received the money, 
the relation between us ends. In the other 
case we are co-working together to a com- 
mon end — namely, the creation of a good 
garden. I furnish the soil and the tools ; 
he furnishes the labor. If I am not loyal 
to him, I cannot expect him to be loyal to 
me. If he is not loyal to me, the garden 
will not be well cultivated. The aphorism, 
Labor is a commodity to be sold in a 
market, is a falsehood, and yet it has passed 
current, as though it were a true coin, for 
many years, in the industrial world. 

Individual industrialism produced, as all 
falsehoods do, incalculable evils in its prac- 
tical operation. It has tended to a concentra- 
tion of wealth in the hands of the few, and 



44 The Industrial Problem 

has done little if anything to diminish the 
impoverishment of the many. It has stead- 
ily lessened, and often finally destroyed, the 
profits of the prosperous and wealthy, and 
so created a necessity for combination to 
decrease production and thus raise prices. 
Under its operation the unfittest have been 
crowded down to an ever lowering rate of 
wages. Thus out of the industrial world 
the poor have been recruited ; out of the 
self-respecting poor the dependent paupers 
have been recruited ; out of the dependent 
paupers the criminal class has been re- 
cruited. The student who desires to ac- 
quaint himself with the industrial evils 
which this system has produced will find 
them depicted in Kirkup's " Inquiry into 
Socialism," in Laveleye's " Socialism of To- 
day," and in Francis A. Walker's " The 
Wages Question." A single quotation from 
the latter book must serve my purpose to- 
night : 

" We know that mill-owners are harassed 



The Industrial Problem 45 

with applications from their hands to take 
children into employment on almost any 
terms, and that the consciences of employers 
have required to be reinforced by the stern- 
est prohibitions and penalties of the law to 
save children ten, seven, or four years old 
from the horrors of l sweating dens ' and 
crowded factories, since the more miserable 
the parents' condition the greater becomes 
the pressure on them to crowd their chil- 
dren somehow, somewhere, into service ; the 
scantier the remuneration of their present 
employment, the less becomes their ability 
to secure promising openings, or to obtain 
favor from outside for the better disposition 
of their offspring." 1 

Individual industrialism has not only 
impoverished man ; it has degraded him ; it 
has promoted and developed inhumanity to 
man. It has set class against class and in- 
dividual against individual. While in our 
churches we have been praying the good 
Lord to deliver us from envy, hatred, 
malice, and all uncharitableness, we have 

1 Francis A. Walker: " The Wages Question," p. 201. 



46 The Industrial Problem 

been pursuing in our industrial life a sys- 
tem whose tendency it was to produce envy, 
hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness. 
John Stuart Mill was educated in the school 
of individualism. To a large extent his 
philosophy was pervaded by the spirit of 
individualism. And yet with that clear- 
ness of vision and that candor of statement 
which characterized him, he both saw and 
described the evils which unregulated in- 
dividualism produced in society. He thus 
presents the socialistic indictment of that 
system : 

" Morally considered, its evils are obvious. 
It is the parent of envy, hatred, and un- 
charitableness ; it makes every one the nat- 
ural enemy of all others who cross his path, 
and every one's path is liable to be crossed. 
Under the present system, hardly any one 
can gain except by the loss or disappoint- 
ment of one or many others. In a well- 
constituted community, every one would be 
a gainer by every other person's successful 
exertions, while now we gain by each other's 
loss, and lose by each other's gain ; and our 



The Industrial Problem 47 

greatest gains come from the worst source 
of all, from death, — the death of those who 
are nearest and should be dearest to us." l 

In this presentment he acts simply as a 
reporter, but in his " Political Economy " 
he denotes unmistakably his sympathy 
with it : 

" I confess I am not charmed with the 
ideal of life held out by those who think 
that the normal state of human beings is 
that of struggling to get on ; that the tramp- 
ling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on 
each other's heels, which form the existing 
type of social life, are the most desirable lot 
of human kind, or anything but the disa- 
greeable symptoms of one of the phases of 
industrial progress." l 

In these four respects,— scientifically, eco- 
nomically, industrially and morally, — the 
era of combination is far more in accord- 
ance with essential truth, and has in it far 

1 J. S. Mill : * ' Chapters on Socialism, ' ' Fortnightly Bevieiv, 
Vol. XXXI, p. 227; also in Literary Magazine, March and 
April, 1879, p. 267. 

1 John Stuart Mill: " Principles of Political Economy," Book 
iv, chap, vi, sec. 2. 



48 The Industrial Problem 

more of promise for the human race than 
the era from which we are emerging. It is 
based on the doctrine that to make efficient 
and harmonious life the struggle for others 
must combine with the struggle for self. In 
the trades union the stronger workman re- 
gards the interest of the weaker workman, 
the more efficient considers the welfare of 
the less efficient, and if there is some tend- 
ency to level down the wages of the best, it 
is compensated for by the tendency to level 
up the wages of the poorer. Every man 
acts as in some sense his brother's keeper. 
An injury to one is counted an injury to 
all, and a benefit to one a benefit to all. 
If this is true in the labor organization, it 
is also true that in the capitalistic organiza- 
tion the combination means a common en- 
deavor to serve a common interest. In 
theory always, and in practice often, the 
great financiers, the presidents and direct- 
ors of the railroads, the factories, and the 
banks, take care of the interests of stock- 
holders who have not the financial ability 



The Industrial Problem 49 

to take care of their own interests. No 
doubt these great officials are well paid for 
their service — sometimes overpaid ; but the 
industrial system which combines capitalists 
in a corporation is based upon mutual confi- 
dence and tends toward a mutual industrial 
fellowship. No doubt in the labor unions 
the best workmen sometimes suffer and 
the inefficient workmen are sometimes con- 
firmed in their inefficiency ; but the trades 
union stands upon the principle that a com- 
mon interest binds all together in a common 
enterprise, and that each man is under moral 
obligation to care for his neighbor as well 
as for himself. No doubt the present sys- 
tem tends to class selfishness, but class self- 
ishness is an improvement on individual 
selfishness. As denominational loyalty is 
better than irreligion, as national patriot- 
ism is better than clannishness, so class 
combination is better than individualism. 
But we may well hope and labor and pray 
for the time when denominational loyalty 
shall become loyalty to the Kingdom of 



50 The Industrial Problem 

Christ, and national patriotism shall de- 
velop a life of humanity, overturning all 
geographical and racial separation, and the 
principle, an injury to one is an injury to 
all, shall be recognized alike by capitalist 
and laborer as of universal application, and 
each shall see that an injury to the capi- 
talist is an injury to the laborer, and an 
injury to the laborer, an injury to the 
capitalist. 

This is fraternal industrialism. It rests 
upon the scientific principle that the strug- 
gle for others is as essential to evolution as 
the struggle for self, and upon the economic 
principle that the relation between those 
engaged in productive industry is the 
relation of partners in a common enter- 
prise. It is true that this principle has not 
yet got itself established in the industrial 
world. Capitalists educated in the old 
school of individual industrialism to be- 
lieve that labor is a commodity which they 
are to buy and sell as they buy and sell 
their machinery, and which they are to 



The Industrial Problem 51 

throw away when it becomes old and ineffi- 
cient, as they throw away the old and ineffi- 
cient machinery, resist the notion that the 
laborer has anything else to do in a common 
enterprise than to perform the labor allotted 
to him, or that the capitalist is under any 
other obligation to his employee than to pay 
the wages which he has promised him. 
Too many employers still accept as true the 
principle enunciated in their name by a 
writer in the Forum a few years ago : 



a 



I admit — no, I assert — the demands of 
charity on every human being, but charity 
and business are and forever ought to be 
divorced. An employer is under no more 
financial obligation to his workmen after he 
has paid their current wages than they are 
to him, or to a passer-by on the street whom 
they never saw. 



» 1 



But an increasing number of employers 
recognize the truth that there is some other 
relation between the employer and the 

1 W. A. Croffut : " What Rights Have Laborers? " Forum, 
May, 1886. 



52 The Industrial Problem 

employed than that between a purchaser 
and the vendor of an article ; that they are 
in some sense partners engaged in a com- 
mon enterprise ; that the workmen have and 
ought to have some voice in determining 
the conditions under which the labor shall 
be performed, and some share in the profits 
when the enterprise is profitable. The fac- 
tory legislation in England and in the 
United States, the prohibition of child 
labor, the regulation of women's labor, 
the requirement by law of certain sanitary 
conditions, and the various provisions for 
profit sharing, from the sliding scale in 
wages to the devices for enabling the labor- 
ing man to become a stockholder in the 
industry, all point in the direction of that 
conception which regards the relation be- 
tween laborer and capitalist as that of 
partnership, and away from that concep- 
tion which regards the relation as that of 
the seller and buyer of a material thing. 

As we have begun to pass from the era 
of individual industrialism into the era 



The Industrial Problem 53 

of fraternal industrialism a great improve- 
ment has taken place in the condition of 
the laborers. The wages of the laborer are 
better, the death rate is lessened, pauper- 
ism is decreased, the homes are more ade- 
quately equipped, drunkenness is dimin- 
ished, education is more general. Indeed, 
it would be impossible to mention one 
single item in respect to which the work- 
ing man is not better off where labor is 
organized and capital is organized than he 
was under the old system of individual 
industrialism. 

This economic improvement has been 
accompanied by intellectual and moral 
development. The extent to which fra- 
ternal industrialism is operating to improve 
the moral character of men is exemplified 
by a single illustration. In the coal strike 
in Pennsylvania in 1900, over one hundred 
thousand miners combined. They included 
men of every religion, — Jew, Roman Cath- 
olic, Protestant, as well as the agnostic. 
They included men of different races and 



54 The Industrial Problem 

of many different nationalities. It is said 
that they included men who spoke a score 
of different languages and dialects. In the 
old world and under the old system, these 
men would have been each for himself, and 
every man against his neighbor. In the new 
world, and under the new system, they forgot 
their religious differences, their racial differ- 
ences, their national differences, their lin- 
guistic differences ; they forgot even their 
industrial differences, and recognized only 
the common humanity which bound them 
together. All the evils of the coal strike, its 
violence and its crime, were incidental. The 
one great, vital, essential fact was that a host 
of men combined to support one another in 
a common endeavor to better their con- 
dition, the richer suffering for the poorer, 
the stronger for the weaker, the better paid 
for the ill paid, the Roman Catholic and the 
Scotch Presbyterian, the Jew and the ortho- 
dox Christian, the Calvinist and the agnos- 
tic, in a common faith in humanity, if not 
in a common faith in God, working to- 



The Industrial Problem S5 

gether for the benefit of their class, if not 
for the benefit of the human race. 

To sum up to-night's lecture in a sen- 
tence : I have tried to show you that the 
organization of labor and of capital marks 
a necessary step in the progress of the 
human race ; that this progress is scientific, 
economic, industrial, and ethical ; that it is 
impossible to return to the individualism 
of the past ; that we should not if we could, 
that we could not if we would ; that the 
solution of our labor problem lies not in 
harking back to an ancient and discarded 
philosophy of life, but in moving forward 
toward a larger liberty, because of a better 
organization of the industrial forces of 
society. 



II 

THE POLITICAL SOLUTION- 
REGULATION 



II 

THE POLITICAL SOLUTION— REGULATION 

In the preceding lecture I endeavored to 
show you that industrial organization, both 
of capitalists and of laborers, is a necessary 
result of human development ; that it char- 
acterizes a stage of development which is 
philosophically, economically, and ethically 
higher than that of the industrial individ- 
ualism from which we are emerging, and 
that a return to industrial individualism is 
neither possible nor desirable. 

If this be true, why should the existence 
of great organizations of laborers and 
capitalists give us any concern ? Why do 
they present any problem, or involve us in 
any perplexity ? 

Because combination has a tendency to 
produce monopoly, and monopoly neces- 
sarily tends to despotism. This constitutes 



60 The Political Solution — Regulation 

what we sometimes erroneously call the 
trust problem. What is a trust? 

In 1882 a number of petroleum refiners 
in Pennsylvania formed an organization in 
which the separate refining corporations 
were united by a very simple expedient, 
without abandoning their corporate exist- 
ence. A majority of the stock of each 
corporation was given to a body of trustees. 
This gave them the financial control of each 
of these corporations, and enabled them to 
secure a monopoly of the oil refining busi- 
ness. This method of combination of in- 
dependent corporations has been from time 
to time since followed in other combina- 
tions. The combinations thus formed are 
called Trusts. In fact, however, the 
method by which a number of independent 
corporations are combined under a single 
control is a matter wholly immaterial to 
the public. It is not the form of the com- 
bination, but the object and result of the 
combination, which concerns the public. 
It is not, properly speaking, the Trust, but 



The Political Solution — Regulation 61 

the Monopoly, to which the public object. 
Both the object and the effect of the Stand- 
ard Oil Trust were to secure a monopoly of 
the oil refining business. The same thing 
may be said of the Sugar Trust, the To- 
bacco Trust, the Steel Trust, and others less 
famous because not organized and con- 
ducted on so large a scale. Some trusts are 
not, properly speaking, monopolies ; I be- 
lieve the Paper Trust is not. Some of the 
more threatening monopolies are not trusts. 
The famous anthracite coal combine is not 
a trust; that is, the combination has not 
been effected by giving to trustees a ma- 
jority of the stock of the companies which 
are combined in mining and carrying coal. 
But it is a monopoly ; for it is a combination 
of what were before competing corporations, 
and it was effected for the purpose of secur- 
ing a monopoly in anthracite coal. So the 
United Mine Workers is not technically a 
trust, but it is, or is endeavoring to be, a 
monopoly. That is, it is an organization 
of local unions which were before more or 



62 The Political Solution — Regulation 

less independent of one another, and it was 
effected for the purpose of controlling all 
the skilled labor that is engaged in mining 
anthracite coal. 

The same principles apply to a combina- 
tion of capitalists and to a combination of 
laborers, though the term Trust is ordinarily 
used only to designate a combination of 
capitalists, not of laborers, and is, properly 
speaking, used to designate a particular 
kind of capitalistic combination. 

Technically, then, a Trust is a particular 
form of capitalistic combination ; in popular 
parlance, a Trust is any combination of 
capitalists or laborers organized for the pur- 
pose or with the effect of securing a monop- 
oly in any commodity or convenience by 
excluding competition, regulating if not 
limiting output, and determining if not 
enhancing prices. 

The capitalistic organization has been 
made into a monopoly in various ways. 
Sometimes it has sold its goods in a particu- 
lar locality below cost until its competing 



The Political Solution — Regulation 63 

rival has been compelled to abandon its 
business. Sometimes it has refused to sell 
its goods to merchants who handled the 
goods of a competitor, or it has given espe- 
cial rebates to merchants who handled only 
its own goods, or it has secured, generally 
by underhand means, special rebates from 
the railroads, enabling it to undersell its 
competitors, or it has obtained the absolute 
control of an article necessary to the wel- 
fare of the public, as the coal combine has 
secured the control of all the anthracite 
coal in the United States, and thus has been 
able to exclude all competition from the field. 
The laborers' organization has also en- 
deavored to create a monopoly by various 
methods : sometimes by securing a law lim- 
iting or excluding free competition, like the 
Federal law forbidding the free importation 
of contract labor, or the Pennsylvania law 
forbidding the employment of skilled labor 
in the mines except by licensed miners who 
have had two years of apprenticeship in the 
state ; sometimes by creating a public opin- 



64 The Political Solution — Regulation 

ion among laborers themselves which oper- 
ates to exclude the individual laborer from 
any trade in which labor is already organ- 
ized ; sometimes by combining to exclude 
from participation in a given industry all 
laborers who do not belong to the Union, 
that is, who do not cooperate with the mo- 
nopoly, by maintaining what is called the 
closed shop ; sometimes by boycotting any 
concerns which, in the manufacture of their 
goods, employ any laborers who are not 
members of the Union, or by sympathetic 
strikes against any concerns which handle 
goods made by persons who are not mem- 
bers of the Union ; and, finally, by intimi- 
dation and open violence against individual 
labor when it has ventured to enter into 
competition with labor which is organized. 
That there are great ethical differences be- 
tween these methods of excluding competi- 
tion is evident ; but the object sought by 
all is the same — namely, the exclusion of 
all competition, and thus the establishment 
of a practical monopoly. 



The Political Solution — Regulation 65 

Monopolies, whether of labor or capital 
are not to be endured in a free common- 
wealth. It is intolerable that any man, or 
any body of men, should be permitted to 
control such necessaries to modern civilized 
life as oil, coal, beef, sugar, flour, steel, 
transportation, intercommunication, and the 
like, whether their control is justly or un- 
justly, wisely or unwisely, exercised. 

There are many incidental evils in un- 
regulated monopolies. They have corrupted 
government ; oppressed, sometimes finan- 
cially ruined, sometimes literally destroyed, 
individual competitors ; they have been 
curt and overbearing in their treatment of 
rivals, of partners, of the public ; the capi- 
talistic monopoly has demanded the disrup- 
tion and destruction of the labor monopoly, 
that it may be able to control wages as well 
as prices ; the labor monopoly has demanded 
the disruption and destruction of capital- 
istic monopolies, under the delusion that it 
can thus get all the profits of monopoly 
itself, in other words, secure a monopoly of 



66 The Political Solution — Regulation 

monopoly ; in some cases, two monopolies 
have engaged in a life-and-death struggle 
and left the public to suffer, while they have 
either expressly or tacitly denied the right 
of the public to interfere ; in other cases 
they have combined to make the monopoly 
more secure, and have divided the profits 
between themselves. 

But these are only the incidental evils of 
monopolies. A monopoly controlled by 
men regardless alike of public welfare and 
public opinion may inflict a greater imme- 
diate injury on the people than a monopoly 
controlled by men who are either wise 
enough or just enough to see that they can- 
not permanently advance their own inter- 
ests by a policy which sacrifices the inter- 
ests of the public. But the real evil of 
monopoly is inherent, and exists whether 
the monopoly does well or does ill. It is 
the evil which inheres in all absolutism. 
Industrial absolutism is no better than ec- 
clesiastical or political absolutism. It is no 
better and no worse when exercised by a 



The Political Solution — Regulation 67 

labor organization than when exercised by 
a capitalistic organization. It is no more 
defensible when it employs the machinery 
of law than when it puts law at open de- 
fiance ; no better when it defies law by 
means of corrupting legislatures or courts 
than when it defies law by means of mob 
violence. Absolutism is bad alike to him 
who exercises it and to him who is sub- 
jected to it. The absolutism which deter- 
mines the price of our food and our fuel is 
as fatal to freedom as the absolutism which 
determines the limits of our political lib- 
erty. A Czar in the coal fields is no more 
to be endured by a free people than a Czar 
in the palace. A Czar who determines 
under what conditions we may have the 
necessities of life is not to be tolerated be- 
cause he prescribes just or even generous 
conditions ; and he is not tolerable whether 
he secures his power to prescribe the condi- 
tions by an organization of capital, or by an 
organization of labor, or by a combination 
of the two organizations working together. 



68 The Political Solution— Regulation 

In 1623 the Statute of Monopolies was 
passed by the English Parliament, after 
half a century of agitation. It made all 
monopolies illegal except such as might be 
granted by Parliament or such as were in- 
volved in patents for new inventions. 
Since that time the question whether 
monopolies are allowable among a free 
people is not an open question in Anglo- 
Saxon communities. The fact that the 
monopoly is secured, not by governmental 
prohibitions, but by capitalistic or labor 
combinations, does not make it any more 
endurable. Whenever a monopoly is se- 
cured which gives to one man or to a small 
number of men the control of any article 
important to public comfort, the people ob- 
ject, and ought to object. It is a matter of 
no importance whether that monopoly is 
secured by a union of corporations, by a 
legal agreement between corporations, by 
an informal " understanding " between cor- 
porations, by one corporation, or by a single 
man : the monopoly is itself objection- 



The Political Solution— Regulation 69 

able, and the method by which it is ob- 
tained is a matter of comparative indiffer- 
ence. 

The people ought to object to monopoly, 
however it is maintained, because indus- 
trial servitude and political freedom cannot 
long coexist in the same community. 
Either the political freedom will find a way 
to destroy the monopoly and establish in- 
dustrial freedom, or the monopoly will find 
a way to destroy the political freedom and 
establish a political plutocracy. If mo- 
nopoly should be allowed to control the 
food, the lights, the fuel, and the transpor- 
tation of the American people, the Ameri- 
can people would cease to be free, whatever 
semblance of freedom their powerless po- 
litical institutions might retain. The man 
who can determine for me the conditions 
on which I may eat, read, keep warm, and 
travel, is my master, whatever he may call 
himself or I may call him. The real issue 
involved in the so-called Trust Problem is 
industrial freedom, and that involves po- 



jo The Political Solution — Regulation 

litical freedom. The real questions which 
the American people are compelled by pres- 
ent conditions to consider are, Will they 
preserve their liberty ? and, How will they 
preserve their liberty ? The peril to those 
liberties is not political, but commercial ; it 
is not a peril of imperialism, but of plutoc- 
racy ; it comes not from a standing army, 
but from a monopolized industry. And 
the object of the people must be, not merely 
to punish private monopoly when it does 
ill, but to prevent private monopoly from 
existing. This is not equivalent to saying 
that they must prevent combinations of 
capital from existing. Our problem is 
not to destroy economic combinations, 
whether of capital or labor, but to make 
them the servants, not the masters, of the 
people. 

There are three classes of remedies for 
the evils of monopoly ; political, indus- 
trial, and ethical. Political action may 
ameliorate economic conditions ; industrial 
reform may change economic conditions ; 



The Political Solution — Regulation 71 

but only the transfusion of the commodity 
by a right ethical spirit can really radically 
change the economic conditions and bring 
permanent peace. Political action will fa- 
cilitate industrial reform ; industrial reform 
will facilitate ethical development ; but 
ethical development is necessary to the pro- 
motion both of political action and indus- 
trial reform. The three movements, — the 
political, the industrial and the ethical, — 
must be carried on together, and while the 
main work of the ministry lies in the in- 
culcation of right ethical principles and the 
promotion of the right ethical spirit, the 
ministry must know enough of political 
and economic law to be able intelligently 
to apply ethical principles to economic con- 
ditions and make them efficacious in the 
social life of the community. 

In further consideration of this subject I 
propose to give this evening to a considera- 
tion of possible political action. 

Such political action may take one of three 
forms, and one of these three forms it must 



72 The Political Solution — Regulation 

take or the Republic will pass either under 
the absolutism of plutocracy in city and 
state, or into a condition of perpetual and 
increasing war between capitalistic and 
labor organizations. Those three possible 
actions may be thus stated : 

Whenever any private monopoly, whether 
of capitalists or laborers, controls any com- 
modity or convenience important to the 
public welfare, the people must destroy this 
monopoly by restoring competition ; put 
the monopoly under governmental control ; 
or take possession of the monopoly and ad- 
minister it for the benefit of the people. 

To illustrate : At the present time the 
coal combine controls the entire output of 
anthracite coal in this country. It is im- 
material to the public how that coal com- 
bine is maintained, whether by a union of 
corporations, a formal agreement between 
corporations, or an informal " understand- 
ing. " That the combination controls the 
fuel on which the Atlantic seaboard is 
accustomed to depend was made painfully 



The Political Solution — Regulation 73 

evident two years ago. For such a condi- 
tion there are three remedies : 

The people may by legal proceedings 
break up the combine and compel compe- 
tition — if they can. The people may bring 
the coal companies under government con- 
trol, as by a law to compel the coal com- 
panies and their employees to submit their 
controversies to some appointed tribunal — 
a method infelicitously termed " compul- 
sory arbitration.'' Or finally, the people 
may take possession of the coal-mines and 
operate them under governmental adminis- 
tration for the public benefit, as the post- 
office is operated in this country, the tele- 
graph in England, and some of the rail- 
roads on the continent of Europe. This 
plan was advocated by the platform of the 
Democratic party in the State of New York 
a few years ago. 

That there are serious objections to each 
one of these plans furnishes no conclusive 
reason why some one of them should not 
be tried. The conservative objector, if he 



74 The Political Solution — Regulation 

would carry the American people with him, 
must be prepared to show, either that allow- 
ing a private monopoly to control the an- 
thracite coal supply of the United States is 
not objectionable, or that there is some bet- 
ter way of preventing such monopoly than 
any of the three methods suggested. Be- 
fore considering these remedies, attention 
must be paid to a fourth which is some- 
times suggested by the sentence— leave all 
industrial organizations to the operation of 
natural law. 

No doubt there is always a danger of un- 
wise interference with natural laws ; of such 
an attempt to regulate as will be injurious, 
not beneficial, to the community ; of a con- 
trol that may become despotic and so both 
unjust and disastrous. No doubt great 
wisdom and great care should be exercised 
in regulating trade and commerce ; no doubt 
individual liberty should be maintained as 
far as it can be made consistent with the 
public welfare ; no doubt the more we can 
make the private conscience, enforced by 



The Political Solution — Regulation 75 

public opinion, efficacious, and the less we 
have to resort to governmental authority, 
the better. All this may be and is true. 
But the notion that the remedy for industrial 
ills can be found by a do-nothing policy, in 
the faith that natural law will bring about 
universal justice and will promote the com- 
mon welfare, ignores the self-evident facts 
of modern industrial life. 

A man on a higher level builds a dam 
across the stream which irrigates his neigh- 
bor's grounds, and diverts the water to his 
own uses. His neighbor complains of the 
water famine which destroys the fertility of 
his land. The dam-builder replies, " Law 
must not interfere. You must leave natural 
law to take its course." The reply is not 
far to seek. The dam-builder does not 
leave natural law to take its course. By 
building the dam he has himself interfered 
with the course of natural law. What he 
really means, whether he is conscious of it 
or not, is this : " I must have a right to 
interfere with natural law, and you, my 



76 The Political Solution — Regulation 

neighbor, must not. You must not inter- 
fere with my interference/' And this is 
exactly what is meant by the plea that 
natural law must be left to take its course 
without legislative interference, when that 
plea is put forth by the advocates of trusts, 
monopolies, and combines. 

When natural law ruled in this continent, 
the North American Indians blazed path- 
ways through the forests, and when any one 
of them wished to travel, he put his goods 
upon his back, or upon his wife's back, and 
took what path he pleased, when he pleased, 
and traveled at what rate he pleased. When 
civilization took possession of the continent, 
one of the things it did was to create by law 
an artificial person called a railroad corpo- 
ration ; to this artificial person it gave the 
right to take the real estate of A and B and 
C, — and so through the whole alphabet 
many times repeated, whether A and B and 
C wished to sell or not, and to pay them, not 
what price they asked, but whatever price a 
disinterested tribunal put upon the land. 



The Political Solution — Regulation 77 

And so, by a most direct and positive inter- 
ference with natural law, a public highway 
was constructed by which individuals and 
goods could be more conveniently carried 
than in packs upon the back of the traveler 
along a blazed pathway through the forest. 
Society created this artificial person, and 
conferred upon this person this artificial 
power, because it rightly believed that thus 
the public interests would be promoted and 
the public welfare advanced. Now that it 
finds this power unjustly used, not for the 
equal service of all, but for enriching one 
and impoverishing another, and it proposes 
to require this artificial person to use this 
artificial power for the benefit of the public 
and not for its injury, what sense is there in 
crying out against the requirement on the 
ground that government should leave trans- 
portation to the operation of natural law ? 
It is not left to the operation of natural law. 
It is carried on by artificial organizations 
created by law and equipped with artificial 
power by law. And it is eminently right 



jS The Political Solution — Regulation 

that society, which has created and em- 
powered the corporations to serve the com- 
munity, should require them to render the 
service for which they were created. Other- 
wise the corporation becomes the iron despot 
of the Frankenstein who has created it. 

There are stored up in the hills of Penn- 
sylvania great masses of coal. Under the 
operation of natural law any man might go 
to these hills, put in his pick, and dig out 
what coal he needed for his fuel, as the 
North American Indian cut down in the 
forest whatever wood he needed for his fuel. 
But civilization cannot go on under the oper- 
ation of natural law. So, by a complicated 
artificial system, we have given the owner- 
ship of these lands to individuals ; we have 
given the ownership of the top of the soil to 
one set of individuals, and ownership of the 
underground mines to another set of indi- 
viduals. Their right to the soil depends 
wholly upon the artificial arrangements 
which society has made. Society deter- 
mines what they may own, how far down 



The Political Solution — Regulation 79 

they may own, for how long a time they may 
own, under what conditions they may own. 
In England the owner may control the land 
for an indefinite period after his death. In 
America he can control it for only two lives. 
In France he must divide it in a certain 
fixed proportion among his children. 

This individual proprietary right in land 
is wholly an artificial right, created by 
statute, controlled and regulated by stat- 
ute. And it has been so created and regu- 
lated because society thinks that this is the 
best method for the promotion of the general 
interests of society. And now, when the 
owners of these coal lands combine and 
charge extortionate prices for the fuel 
which they did not create, and their right 
to control which is wholly an artificial 
right created by society, to aver that 
society's power to regulate and control 
has been exhausted, and that it cannot go 
on and compel the owners whose right in 
the coal it has created, to use these rights in 
subordination to the public right to fuel, is 



80 The Political Solution — Regulation 

to affirm that society may create rights 
which it is powerless to regulate after it 
has created them; that it may interfere 
with natural laws just far enough to give 
to a dozen operators a monopoly in a fuel 
necessary to human well-being, if not to 
human life, but may not interfere when 
interference becomes necessary to prevent 
individual greed from inflicting untold dis- 
aster on the general public. 

Civilization is not the product of natural 
laws operating without human interven- 
tion. It is the product of natural laws 
employed by man for man's benefit. 
Natural law does not make a locomotive or 
a dynamo. Man, understanding natural 
law, and using it for his purposes, makes 
the locomotive and the dynamo, and by 
means of them causes steam and electricity 
to do what he wishes them to do. He 
possesses power to use natural forces to ac- 
complish predetermined ends. He pos- 
sesses the same power to direct intellectual 
and moral forces to predetermined ends. 



The Political Solution — Regulation 81 

By this capacity he has built the locomo- 
tive, the dynamo, the stationary engine. 
By this capacity he has built up the State, 
the Church, the school, the various indus- 
trial organizations. This capacity distin- 
guishes him from the beasts. To forego 
this capacity and leave natural law to work 
out its results unmodified by human voli- 
tion would be to go back to barbarism, nay, 
to the pre-human conditions of the field 
and the forest. To stop in the use of this 
intelligence when it has gone far enough to 
serve the few who are well and strong, and 
not far enough to serve the many, would be 
simply to perpetuate in a new form that 
aristocracy against which democracy in 
government, education, and religion is a 
revolt. 

In attempting to make natural law 
serve, not the favored few, but all the 
people, democracy will make mistakes : it 
will attempt unsuccessful experiments ; it 
will meet with failures ; and it will be ob- 
structed by some who think that nothing 



82 The Political Solution — Regulation 

can be but what has been, and by others 
who, having the larger share of the world's 
wealth and power, object to any further dis- 
tribution of either. But this movement so 
to use natural laws, so to administer natural 
forces — both physical and moral — as to 
serve the welfare of the entire people, can- 
not be permanently either halted or 
diverted by the unspecious plea that nat- 
ural law is not to be directed to wise and 
profitable ends by human intelligence and 
human wills. 

When therefore the state is imperiled by 
monopoly whether of labor or capital, the 
law may attempt to destroy the monopoly 
by restoring competition ; it may suffer the 
monopoly to continue, but put it under gov- 
ernmental control ; or finally, it may take 
possession of the monopoly and administer 
it for the benefit of the people. 

I. The first method is the one which has 
heretofore had the greatest favor with both 
our state and federal legislators. It is the 
method which seems to me least hopeful of 



The Political Solution— Regulation 83 

permanent and valuable results, although 
there is no doubt that something can be 
done by legislation to restrain or prevent 
evils that are incidental to a period of great 
industrial organization. Two specific pieces 
of legislation have been urged by practical 
business men for this purpose. 

In their greed for the quick acquisition of 
wealth men have put artificial valuations 
upon their property by the process known 
as stock watering. When this is done some 
one inevitably suffers. 

A great railroad and coal company is 
capitalized at the rate of two hundred thou- 
sand dollars a mile when about one hun- 
dred thousand dollars a mile would be a 
fair estimate of the cost of construction. 
This is not an imaginary but a real case, 
one probably of many similar cases. The 
stocks and bonds representing the ficti- 
tious value are, in many cases, in the hands 
of innocent purchasers who bought them 
supposing that they represented a real value. 
They naturally expect dividends on their 



84 The Political Solution — Regulation 

investment, and naturally desire as large 
dividends as they can get. The president 
and directors of the road are elected for the 
purpose of earning and paying these divi- 
dends. But if they are to pay dividends on 
property which has no existence, they must 
get the money out of some one. They can 
get it out of the public, by charging a higher 
price for coal than would be enough to give 
a fair compensation to all the workers and a 
fair rate of interest on the capital actually 
invested in and represented by the prop- 
erty ; or out of the wage-earners, by paying 
in salaries and wages less than they could 
pay if the public paid a fair price for ctal 
and the company had to pay dividends only 
on the actual value of the property owned 
by the corporation ; or the directors can 
get part of the money out of the public 
and part of the money out of the wage- 
earners ; or, finally, they can leave the stock- 
holders without dividends and sell the coal 
at a fair price, and pay the coal miners fair 
wages. But it is impossible to pay divi- 



The Political Solution — Regulation 85 

dends on property which has no existence, 
and pay fair wages to the wage-earners, and 
sell the coal at a fair price to the public. 
Law in America can correct this palpable 
abuse by not allowing any company to issue 
bonds and stock on property for more than 
its actual value, as that value has been esti- 
mated by some independent and impartial 
tribunal. 

The greed to get rich quickly, character- 
istic of our commercial age, also tempts the 
managers of great corporations to various 
illicit transactions which will not bear the 
light of day, and in which they would 
not take part if the transactions could be 
known and public opinion could pass judg- 
ment upon them. Miss Tarbell, in her 
" History of the Standard Oil Company/ ' 
and Mr. Lawson, in his articles on " Frenzied 
Finance/' have given account of some trans- 
actions of this kind. And although the 
impartial historian has not yet sifted out 
these narratives and finally determined 
what measure of exaggeration or misinter- 



86 The Political Solution — Regulation 

pretation is intermingled with them, there 
is no doubt that by Mr. Lawson some truth 
has been told, and by Miss Tarbell the sub- 
stantial truth has been told. The remedy 
for such transactions as those by which 
in some instances individuals have been 
ruined, in other instances the public has 
been mulcted by secret operations, is a law 
subjecting the books of all great corpora- 
tions to government inspection, and requir- 
ing the operations of all great corporations, 
under proper limitations and regulations, 
to be made a matter of public record. 

It is possible, also, that in some cases the 
law may directly break up a combination 
which is becoming a monopoly, and estab- 
lish competition in its place. This is the 
object of the famous Sherman anti-trust 
law, which prohibits all combinations that 
are in restraint of trade but which, under 
the Constitution of the United States, as 
interpreted by the Supreme Court of the 
United States, can be applied only to com- 
binations engaged in interstate commerce. 



The Political Solution — Regulation 87 

But speaking broadly, the limits of the 
power of government to prevent combina- 
tion and reestablish competition are very 
soon reached. Stevenson, the founder of 
the railway system, declared something 
like a century ago, that wherever com- 
bination is possible, competition is im- 
possible, and industrial history since has 
fully confirmed that statement. It is gen- 
erally unwise for legislators to attempt to 
create an artificial crime. There is noth- 
ing inherently criminal in an industrial 
combination, and the attempt to make an 
industrial combination criminal generally 
fails. It fails because the public con- 
science does not sustain it, and in a demo- 
cratic country no criminal law can be en- 
forced unless the public conscience does 
sustain it. 

The attempt to prohibit pooling fur- 
nishes an illustration of this general 
truth. The law prohibits railroads which 
are engaged in interstate commerce and 
which have parallel lines, from combin- 



88 The Political Solution — Regulation 

ing to fix a common freight rate and 
agreeing to divide the freight between 
competing points among the lines. The 
chief effect of this law has been to make 
such agreements secret instead of open, 
and therefore more injurious to the pub- 
lic. The State laws prohibit a combina- 
tion of coal companies. The chief, if not 
the only, effect of such prohibition, has 
been to make the agreement secret, instead 
of open : there has been no formal bargain, 
at least, so it is affirmed, between the com- 
peting coal companies ; but their represent- 
atives have met from time to time, and as 
the result of that meeting a common price 
has been maintained ; and so far as the pub- 
lic is concerned, the understanding has had 
all the effect of a legal agreement. In 
the main, it may safely be said that at- 
tempt by law, whether of State legislatures 
or of the national Congress, to prohibit com- 
bination and reestablish competition has 
failed, and, experience indicates, necessarily 
will fail. 



The Political Solution — Regulation 89 

II. Legislation may be enacted to bring 
monopolies, whether of labor or of capital, 
under the regulation and control of the 
government. Wherever any combination 
exercises, or attempts to exercise, a monop- 
oly, if it cannot be destroyed, it should 
thus be brought under government con- 
trol ; otherwise the people are brought 
under the control of the monopoly, and 
in so far as this is the case democracy is 
at an end. 

This is politically necessary. It may be 
taken as an axiom that the state within 
the state limits, the nation within the Fed- 
eral limits, is sovereign. But if the state 
allows a monopoly within the state limits, 
if the nation allows a monopoly within the 
Federal limits, it ceases to be sovereign. If 
either allows to exist within its border a 
power which is greater than itself, that 
power becomes sovereign in the field of its 
operation. 

Let a concrete case illustrate this truth. 
The State of New York requires able-bodied 



90 The Political Solution — Regulation 

men, under certain conditions, to serve in the 
militia. A labor union in Schenectady 
enacted a law that no man belonging to 
the militia could remain in the labor 
union. One of the members of this 
union was in the militia, and was 
called upon to perform militia duty in 
time of a strike. He obeyed the call and 
was therefore discharged from the union, 
which then proceeded to demand his dis- 
charge from employment in every " union " 
shop in Schenectady. As practically all 
the shops were " union " shops, he was 
thrown out of employment. Thus the 
issue was clearly raised between the 
state and the union. The state said, 
You shall serve in the militia ; the 
union said, You shall not serve in the 
militia. If the state had suffered this, 
it would in so far have abdicated its au- 
thority ; the union would have become 
sovereign, and the state subject. The 
issue in this case was unmistakable. 
The state met it with an act making 



The Political Solution — Regulation 91 

such interference with the militia law 
of the state a penal offense, and the 
man was reinstated in employment. 
The same issue was presented, and, 
happily, with the same result, to the 
Federal government. The Typographical 
Union expelled one of its members. It 
then demanded of the Federal govern- 
ment that he be dismissed from the 
government printing department. He 
was accordingly discharged, but was at 
once reinstated by the President. If his 
discharge had been suffered by the Presi- 
dent, the President would in so far have 
recognized the authority of the union 
to determine who might be employed 
in one department of the government. 

These concrete illustrations present very 
clearly the issue, Is the state or the labor 
union sovereign ? But the issue is also pre- 
sented, though not quite so clearly, in the 
case of the railroads. The railroad is a 
public highway. It has been created by 
the government, though operated by pri- 



92 The Political Solution — Regulation 

vate enterprise, for the carriage of freight, 
passengers, and mails. More than a quar- 
ter of a century ago Senator Booth put the 
railway problem thus succinctly : " For- 
merly our means of locomotion were poor 
and the highways were public; now the 
means of locomotion are admirable, and 
the highways are private property.' ' If the 
government should allow this aphorism to 
remain true, it would abdicate in favor of 
the railroad. It would suffer one of the 
most important elements in the life of the 
people, one of the most essential to its wel- 
fare, to pass from under the control of the 
people into the control of private corpo- 
rations. It would abdicate its sovereignty, 
and the railroads in the field of their oper- 
ation would become sovereign in its stead. 
The proposition that any monopoly may 
be suffered permanently to exist in America 
free from government control is the prop- 
osition that in so far as that monopoly is 
operative the nation should turn over its 
sovereignty to the monopoly. To do this 



The Political Solution — Regulation 93 

on any large scale, by abdicating its right 
to regulate and control monopolies, would 
be to bring free, popular government to an 
end. It would substitute in place of gov- 
ernment of the people, by the people, and 
for the people, government over the people, 
by the monopolies, and for the monopolies. 

It is not necessary for my purpose in this 
course of lectures to enter upon any discus- 
sion of the question how this regulation of 
industrial monopolies by government action 
should be effected. It is not necessary for 
the ministry to be wise in purely constitu- 
tional and legal questions, and it is de- 
cidedly injurious for the ministry to assume 
on such questions a wisdom which it does 
not possess. There are certain questions, 
however, under this branch of our subject 
which it is well you should know are 
under discussion, and on which there are 
differences of opinion among intelligent 
and thoughtful men. They are such as 
these : 

1. Shall the regulation of monopoly be 



94 The Political Solution — Regulation 

left to the states or shall it be assumed by 
the Federal government ? 

2. Can it be exercised under common 
law, or are additional statutary enactments 
necessary ? 

3. Has the Federal government all the 
power which it now requires for the enact- 
ment of such governmental regulations, or 
is an amendment of the Constitution de- 
sirable ? 

4. By common consent one chief cause 
of private monopolies is the inequitable ad- 
ministration of the railroads as highways, 
by which special favors are given to one 
class of shippers, and others are excluded 
from competition on equal terms. How 
shall the railways be brought under such 
supervision as will prevent such favor- 
itism ? 

5. There is already existing an Inter- 
state Commerce Commission possessing 
powers of investigation and recommenda- 
tion. Shall it be given further powers, to 
require, on complaint, the railroad to correct 



The Political Solution — Regulation 95 

abuses which by investigation it has dis- 
covered ? Or shall a special court of com- 
merce be created before which the railroad 
may be brought, by the action of the Inter- 
state Commerce Commission, for the adjudi- 
cation of complaints ? 

6. May the Federal government wisely 
encourage, or, if necessary, require, all cor- 
porations engaged in interstate commerce 
to accept Federal incorporation, and so 
come more directly under Federal super- 
vision and control ? 

7. May it wisely prohibit any corpo- 
ration from engaging in either interstate or 
foreign commerce without a license from 
the Federal government, and attach to such 
license whatever requirements are necessary 
to secure legitimate supervision and con- 
trol? 

These are some of the chief questions now 
before Congress, and, through the public 
press, before the people of the country. 
They all assume that some government reg- 
ulation and control of great corporations are 



96 The Political Solution — Regulation 

necessary for the national welfare. Twenty- 
five years ago that proposition was vehe- 
mently denied by probably a majority of the 
representatives of the great corporations ; it 
is now vigorously affirmed, or frankly ac- 
cepted, or tacitly and regretfully acquiesced 
in, by the great majority of those who have 
the administration of the great combina- 
tions of capital. 

The questions respecting the relations of 
law to the organizations of labor have not 
as yet been as clearly put before the coun- 
try, and the conclusions reached by the 
courts of law, it is not easy to formulate in 
any consistent system. This is partly due 
to the fact that there is no such peril to 
the country at large from the labor unions 
that there is from capitalistic combinations : 
partly because the question of the regula- 
tion of labor unions by law is, under our 
Constitution, necessarily a state, not a Fed- 
eral question, and the decisions of one state 
are not an authority in the courts of another 
state ; and partly because the questions 



The Political Solution — Regulation 97 

have presented themselves in such different 
forms and under such differing conditions. 
1 think, however, the following proposi- 
tions, though some of them are not free 
from doubt, may be taken fairly to repre- 
sent the tendency if not absolutely the con- 
sensus of judicial opinion concerning the 
relative rights and responsibilities of the 
government and the labor organizations. 

(1) Laborers have a right to unite in an 
organization for the purpose of promoting 
their common interests. 

(2) In promoting their common inter- 
ests they have a right to strike ; that is, 
they have a right to leave their employer 
in a body for the purpose of securing better 
wages or better conditions of employment. 

(3) They have a right to persuade other 
working men not to take their places, pro- 
vided their persuasion is so conducted as to 
be wholly peaceable, without violence, or 
threats or suggestions of violence. 

(4) They have a right to refuse, and to 
combine with one another in the refusal, to 



98 The Political Solution — Regulation 

purchase goods of their employer or of 
others who are in league or in cooperation 
with their employer. In other words, they 
have a legal right to " boycott/' 

(5) They have no right to attempt di- 
rectly or indirectly to coerce the community 
into a refusal to buy the goods of their em- 
ployer or others in league with or in co- 
operation with him. They have no right 
to attempt to destroy his credit, impair his 
trade, or interfere with his business. Of 
course they have no right to use violence 
against him or his employees. They have 
no right so to surround his work with 
pickets or sentinels as to interfere with 
either customers or working men freely 
going to and fro. They have no right to 
put a " sandwich man " in front of his place 
advising customers not to buy of him. In 
general terms, they have no right to com- 
bine for the purpose of directly injuring 
him or his business, though the mere fact 
that injury to his business incidentally 
grows out of their combination to secure 



The Political Solution — Regulation 99 

benefit to themselves, does not make their 
combination a conspiracy. 

It is not necessary, and I do not believe 
that it is wise, for the ministry to enter 
upon the discussion of these or similar 
specific legal principles, or to take ground, 
except in extraordinary cases, in specific 
labor difficulties ; and I embody here what 
I believe to be the current of legal decision 
in the enumeration of these simple princi- 
ples, not for the purpose of emphasizing 
these principles, but for the purpose of 
illustrating the fundamental truth that 
government has the right, assumes the 
right, and exercises the right, to bring all 
combinations, whether of laborers or of 
capitalists, under governmental regulation 
and control, and that the only limit to this 
governmental regulation and control is the 
judgment of the state through its properly 
constituted representatives, — legislative, ju- 
dicial and executive, — how far such regula- 
tion and control is necessary to maintain 
the peace, liberty, and welfare of the people. 



ioo The Political Solution — Regulation 

III. The third method which govern- 
ment may take in dealing with a monopoly 
is to take possession of it and administer it 
for the benefit of the people. The doctrine 
that the government should take possession 
of all industries and administer them all 
for the benefit of the people, is socialism. 
The doctrine that it should take possession 
of some of the industries and administer 
such industries for the benefit of the people 
is sometimes, though hardly correctly, 
called socialistic. 

There seem to me to be two capital errors 
in state socialism. 

1. It assumes that the evils of society 
are primarily in the organization of society, 
so that if the organization could be changed 
the evils would disappear. But in fact the 
evils of society are inherent in the individ- 
uals who make up that society, and these 
individuals must change before the evils 
will disappear. In truth, the chief evil in 
the present social organism is that it tends 
to develop certain moral evils in the indi- 



The Political Solution— Regulation 101 

vidual. Leave the greed and the ambition 
dominant in the hearts and lives of men, 
and convert the present industrial organi- 
zation into a political organization, and the 
only result would be that the greed and the 
ambition would find a new exercise in a 
pernicious dominance through new forms 
of activity. To take the control of our in- 
dustries out of the hands of our capitalists 
of industry, and give it into the hands of 
our political bosses, would be simply to de- 
throne Mr. Carnegie and to enthrone Mr. 
Tweed and Mr. Croker. The results of in- 
trusting all the industries of a community 
to the control of a state, — and that is, 
essentially, state socialism — while the indi- 
vidual is still left greedy, ambitious, un- 
scrupulous, is strikingly illustrated by the 
history of the Congo State. 

All the land of this State, except that in 
immediate proximity to the home of each 
individual, has been taken by the State as 
belonging to itself. All the industries in 
the cultivation of this land are carried on 



io2 The Political Solution— Regulation 

under its control. The individual citizens, 
being without money and without individ- 
ual industry, are compelled to pay their 
taxes by labor for the State, and the result 
is a despotism, industrial and political, as 
cruel and as debasing as perhaps the world 
has ever seen. Philanthropists and reform- 
ers in Europe and America are carrying on 
a vigorous agitation for the purpose of put- 
ting an end to this concrete illustration of 
state socialism, whose ripened fruit is a nar- 
rowing and cruel slavery. If it be said by 
the socialist that this slavery would not 
exist if the natives, who really ought to 
constitute the State, had the ability to throw 
off the yoke of King Leopold, this fact 
brings us back to the fundamental principle 
that the state never can be better than the 
individual members who compose it. The 
individuals who constitute the Congo Free 
State have not such ability, and concentra- 
ting all industrial activity in the political 
organization only makes the despotism both 
more intolerable and more difficult to over- 



The Political Solution — Regulation 103 

throw. The fundamental evil of all social 
organism lies in the individuals who con- 
stitute that organism. The mere change of 
the organism, leaving in it one or a few 
strong and unscrupulous men, and many 
relatively ignorant and incompetent, will 
always issue in despotism. To transfer the 
control of the industries from an industrial 
organization to the political organization 
would not be to relieve, and would prob- 
ably be to aggravate, despotic conditions. 

2. The state socialists are also in error 
in assuming that all functions of society 
should be carried on by one organism. 
They are right in believing that industry 
should be democratic ; they are wrong in 
thinking that it can be made democratic 
only by being brought under political con- 
trol. Our churches are democratic organiza- 
tions, but they are not under the control of 
the state. In fact, emancipation from the 
control of the state was necessary in order 
to make them democratic institutions. Our 
schools are democratic ; only in a modified 



104 The Political Solution — Regulation 

sense are they under the control of the state. 
The administration of the schools is only 
quasi-political, and, speaking generally, the 
more the public school comes under polit- 
ical administration and control the worse 
the public school is administered. 

But although the administration of all in- 
dustries by the state is for both these reasons 
not an end to be sought, there are unques- 
tionably certain industries which can be 
carried on under the direction of the state, 
with advantage to its people. No man who 
reads the history of the past century can 
doubt that the century has seen a great in- 
crease of governmental functions. 

The Constitution of Alabama says that 
" the sole and only legitimate end of 
government is to protect the citizen in 
the enjoyment of life, liberty, and prop- 
erty, and when government exercises 
other functions it is usurpation and op- 
pression " ; and this sentence, Mr. Lecky 
declares, 1 expresses the best spirit of Ameri- 

1 W. E. H. Lecky, " Democracy and Liberty, 7 ' Vol. 1, p. 118. 



The Political Solution — Regulation 105 

can statesmanship. There may be some 
question as to what is the best spirit of 
American statesmanship, but this phrase 
certainly does not represent the controlling 
spirit of American statesmanship to-day. 

Our government carries on a great trans- 
portation business in the carriage of mails ; 
a great educational business in the mainte- 
nance and administration of public schools ; 
provides recreation for the people through 
municipal administration in its parks, its 
public concerts, its public museums and 
libraries; provides water supply in prac- 
tically all the larger towns ; and is begin- 
ning to provide their lighting. All this is 
doing much more than merely " protecting 
the citizen in the enjoyment of life, liberty, 
and property/' and only a very small mi- 
nority of American doctrinaires would call 
the exercise of any of these functions " usur- 
pation and oppression. " The recent Report 
of the Department of Agriculture, and the 
summary of its operations in the President's 
Annual Message illustrate in a striking 



io6 The Political Solution — Regulation 

manner the extent to which governmental 
functions have been carried beyond sim- 
ply protecting life, liberty, and property. 
This department has a faculty of two 
thousand specialists making research into 
all the sciences of production ; reaches every 
state and territory in the nation and the is- 
lands of the sea lately come under our 
flag ; investigates meteorology and its re- 
lations to plant and animal life ; anticipates 
the seasons of the cyclones from the south 
and the cold winds from the north, and ad- 
vises agriculturists respecting them ; inspects 
meats, guards the health of animals and so 
protects the excellence of our flocks and 
herds ; has promoted the cultivation of rice 
on the Gulf, so that we are now exporting 
it to rice-growing countries, the cultivation 
of macaroni wheat in the west and the 
southwest, and the cultivation of figs, dates, 
and mangoes in southern California ; it is 
fighting the boll weevil, has imported for 
propagation an ant which has proved an 
effective enemy to the weevil in Guatemala, 



The Political Solution — Regulation 107 

and a parasitic fly from South Africa to 
fight the black scale, the worst enemy of 
the orange-grower in Southern California ; 
it has also imported large quantities of the 
mulberry as a preparation for silk-growing. 
All this costs money, mounting up to half 
a score or more millions of dollars every 
year. Similar work is being carried on for 
the reclamation of arid lands and the pres- 
ervation and development of forests. 

How far the nation, the state, the city, 
or the village should go in the conduct of 
industries, it is certainly difficult and per- 
haps at the present time impossible to 
state. But we have assuredly passed be- 
yond the era in which it is to be assumed 
that the only function of government is to 
govern. There are two principles by which 
we may be guided in our further progress. 

First, the community should not assume 
the administration of all industries, but 
should leave to private enterprise those in- 
dustries which can be carried on better by 
private enterprise ; by so doing it will se- 



108 The Political Solution — Regulation 

cure the benefit of that initiative which in- 
dividual competition stimulates. Second, 
the community should assume the admin- 
istration of those industries, the organiza- 
tion and uniform direction of which are 
important, if not essential, to its welfare as 
a community, whenever experience indi- 
cates that it can administer those industries 
for its own benefit better than they will be 
administered by private enterprise. For 
example : a city cannot live a prosperous 
life without a well-organized system of 
furnishing water and light, but it can live 
a prosperous life without a well-organized 
system for furnishing meat and bread. 
Individual industry can furnish the latter 
and not the former. The state cannot 
maintain a prosperous life without a well- 
organized system furnishing universal 
education within certain limits, but it 
can maintain a prosperous life without 
a well-organized system for furnishing its 
farmers with spades and hoes, or its 
households with furniture. The nation 



The Political Solution — Regulation 109 

cannot maintain a prosperous life with- 
out a well-organized system for the car- 
riage of the letters of the people, but it prob- 
ably can maintain a prosperous life and 
leave the carriage of goods and of people to 
private enterprise, under some measure of 
national control. The nation has, there- 
fore, the right to maintain a post-office sys- 
tem, the state a school system, the city a 
water and lighting system : in brief, the 
community has a right to carry on any in- 
dustry which by its nature is a monopoly 
and on the successful carrying on of which 
the welfare of the community depends. In 
determining whether such monopoly shall 
be carried on by the community or by 
private enterprise for the community, it 
may be safely said that whatever the people 
can do for themselves cheaper and better 
than they can hire private enterprise to do 
for them, they may do. 

I may sum up in a paragraph the 
ground which we have already covered. 
We have passed from the epoch of in- 



no The Political Solution — Regulation 

dividual industrialism into the epoch of 
organic or fraternal industrialism. This 
development is to be encouraged and 
directed, not to be regretted or pro- 
hibited. It marks an intellectual, an 
economic, and an ethical advance of the 
human race. But there is peril in the 
existence of great organizations of capitalists 
and of laborers. It is peril lest the great 
industrial organization shall become supe- 
rior to the state and so obtain control of the 
people. If this should occur, and in so 
far as it does occur, the state loses its 
sovereignty, the monopolistic organization 
becomes sovereign, and the people cease to 
be free. The remedy for this peril is not 
an attempt to go back to the era of in- 
dividual industrialism from which we 
have emerged : we are to go forward to 
an era of fraternalism which lies in the 
future, and we are not to be deterred from 
going forward by the cry of socialism. 
The remedy for the perils threatened by 
monopoly is threefold ; political, indus- 



The Political Solution — Regulation 1 1 1 

trial, ethical. Something in the political 
realm may be done by special law to 
correct special abuses ; more may be done 
to bring all monopolistic organizations un- 
der the control of the people through their 
political organizations, municipal, state, and 
national ; and still more can be done by 
assuming the control and administration 
of certain special industries, particularly 
those which are in their nature monopolies, 
and on the just and equal administration 
of which the welfare of the people depends. 
But for the control of the industries by the 
people, that is, for the democratization of 
our industries, we are to look chiefly not to 
political action, but to industrial reform. 
What that industrial reform should be will 
be the subject of the next lecture. 



Ill 

THE ECONOMIC SOLUTION— REOR- 
GANIZATION 



Ill 

THE ECONOMIC SOLUTION— REORGAN- 
IZATION 

Out of the organization of capital and 
the organization of labor, as described in 
a previous lecture, has grown the modern 
industrial problem. That problem may 
be succinctly stated thus : What are the 
right relations between capitalists and 
laborers, and how shall these relations be 
so adjusted and maintained as to promote 
industrial peace and prosperity? To an- 
swer this question we must first see clearly 
what we mean by a capitalist, and what we 
mean by a laborer. 

First, the capitalists owned the laborers ; 
this was slavery. Then the laborers were 
set free from the ownership of the capital- 
ists but were attached to the land. The 
capitalists owed the laborers maintenance 
and protection ; the laborers owed the capi- 



1 16 Economic Solution — Reorganization 

talists loyalty and service. This was feudal- 
ism. Then the laborers were detached from 
the land and were free to sell their service 
wherever they could find an employer. 
They no longer owed loyalty and service to 
the capitalist, and the capitalist no longer 
owed maintenance and protection to the 
laborers. The laborer was free to find em- 
ployment wherever he could and the capi- 
talist was free to hire service wherever he 
could. Under this system all the tools and 
implements of industry passed under the 
control of the capitalist, while most of the 
work carried on by means of these tools and 
implements was performed by the laborers. 
This is the wages system, sometimes called 
capitalism ; it is the industrial system of to- 
day. 

A great deal of the discussion in the press 
assumes that this is the inherent and neces- 
sary condition of industry ; that there always 
must be capitalists and laborers, employers 
and employed ; that there always must be 
one class which owns the tools and imple- 



Economic Solution — Reorganization 117 

ments of industry and another class which 
employs them in production. In point of 
fact, this wages system is not much over one 
hundred years old, and I believe it is sim- 
ply a transition from feudalism to the de- 
mocracy of industry, as feudalism was a tran- 
sition from slavery to the wages system. 

There is no better definition of democracy 
than Abraham Lincoln's " government of 
the people, for the people, by the people." 
This is political democracy. Educational 
democracy is education of the people, for 
the people, by the people. This is the 
principle embodied in our public school 
system, which provides an education for 
all the people, administered by all the 
people. The same principle is also embodied 
in religious democracy : religion of the 
people, having its source and spring in hu- 
man nature ; religion for the people, not for 
an elect few, priests or saints or monks or 
nuns or professed religeuse, — but for all man- 
kind ; religion by the people, the source of 
power in religious institutions being not in 



n8 Economic Solution — Reorganization 

any pope or bishop or conventicle, but in 
the people, so that the clergy are their serv- 
ants, and subject, in the Jast analysis, to 
their direction and control. 

Industrial democracy similarly means in- 
dustry of the people, all the people being 
engaged in the work of production, or 
rather, in the work of mutual service ; in- 
dustry for the people, that is, a system in 
which the profits of that industry are 
shared in some due and right proportion by 
all the people ; industry by the people, 
that is, directed and controlled, not by a 
few captains of industry under whose auto- 
cratic authority the people do their work, 
but by all the people, from whom indus- 
trial authority proceeds and by whom, in 
the last analysis, it is exercised. I do not 
believe that it is possible permanently to 
maintain a condition of society in America 
in which the government shall be demo- 
cratic, education shall be democratic, relig- 
ion shall be democratic, and industry shall 
be autocratic. 



Economic Solution — Reorganization 1 19 

Industrially speaking, then, our labor 
question is twofold. First, what are the 
right relations between capitalists and labor- 
ers, employers and employed, the tool own- 
ers and the tool users, while the wages sys- 
tem continues? and secondly, how shall 
that system be so developed and directed 
as to tend toward a system of industrial de- 
mocracy ? Let us consider these questions 
separately. 

What are the right relations between the 
tool owners and the tool users ? As we have 
already seen, the doctrine of individualistic 
industrialism was that this relation was one 
between the buyer and the vendor of an 
article. It assumed that the laborer had 
labor to sell ; that the capitalist desired to 
buy that labor ; that justice required the 
capitalist to pay the laborer a fair price for 
his labor ; and that the only way to ascer- 
tain what was the fair price for the labor 
was the price which it would bring in a free 
labor market. We have already seen that 
this is not a true definition of the relation 



1 20 Economic Solution — Reorganization 

between the laborer and the capitalist ; that 
the two are partners in a common enterprise, 
the one using the tools, the other providing 
them and keeping them in repair. This the 
laborer profoundly believes, and believing 
this he makes two demands : first, a share 
in the profits ; and second, a share in the 
administration of the partnership. I be- 
lieve that both demands are inherently just, 
though often far from being so to the extent 
and in the method in which they are made. 
Financially, the labor question is, How 
should the profits of the common enter- 
prise be divided between the tool owner 
and the tool user ? The tool user, that is, 
the laborer, demands a share in the profit 
of the common enterprise. He asks for it, 
not as a privilege or a gratuity ; he asks for 
it as his right as a member of the partner- 
ship. The reply sometimes made to this 
demand is that he is unwilling to bear the 
losses, though he wishes to share the profits. 
This reply is specious, but not just. Let 
me try to make this clear. 



Economic Solution — Reorganization 1 2 1 

What is meant by the word " profits ? " 
A shoemaker in a country village owns 
his little shop and his tools, and makes and 
mends shoes. In order to carry on this 
business permanently it is clear that he 
must make enough money out of the sale 
of his shoes to keep his shop, his tools, and 
himself in repair. If he cannot earn 
enough to provide himself with food and 
shelter, to replenish his tools when they are 
worn out, and to keep his shop safe over his 
head, his business will speedily come to an 
end, and he will go to the poorhouse. If 
he does not own the shop, but rents it, he 
must earn money enough to pay the rent or 
he will be evicted. If he does not own the 
tools, but hires them and gives a chattel 
mortgage to secure the money, he must earn 
enough to pay the interest on the chattel 
mortgage or the mortgage will be foreclosed 
and the tools will be taken away from him. 
If he makes only enough to secure such 
maintenance, he is making no profit ; he is 
simply making a living. 



122 Economic Solution — Reorganization 

Instead of a single shoemaker working in 
a village shop, imagine a thousand men and 
women working in a great factory in Lynn ; 
precisely the same principle applies. In 
order to carry on this shoemaking business, 
a sufficient financial return must be secured 
to keep the shop, the tools, and the work- 
ing men, in repair. The shoes produced 
must sell for money enough to give a living 
wage to the working men, to repair the ma- 
chinery as it gets worn out, and to keep the 
factory in which the work is carried on in 
good condition. If the factory and the ma- 
chinery do not belong to the working men 
but to some one else, then a return must be 
secured both sufficient to enable the work- 
ing men to live and also to pay the owners 
of the factory and the machinery a fair 
rental for their property. If this return is 
not secured the business does not pay, and 
sooner or later the factory must go into 
bankruptcy. If the returns are just enough 
to give a fair support to the working men 
and to pay a fair rental for the factory and 



Economic Solution — Reorganization 1 23 

the machinery, it is making a living. If 
it secures more than this it is making a 
profit. 

The working men of to-day claim that 
when such a profit is made they are en- 
titled to a share of it ; that the work of 
the factory is a common work to which the 
tool owners and the tool users alike con- 
tribute, and after a sufficient return to the 
tool owners and the tool users has been 
made to constitute a living business, what 
profit there is over and above that return 
should be divided between the tool owners 
and the tool users in some just and equi- 
table proportion. When in reply to this it 
is said that the tool users, — that is, the la- 
borers, — are not willing to share the losses, 
the answer is that in fact when the business 
is a losing business they do share the losses, 
and not infrequently the business is so ad- 
ministered that the losses come wholly upon 
them. 

An illustration of this participation in 
the losses is afforded by the present condi- 



124 Economic Solution — Reorganization 

tion of the industries of Fall River. * Ow- 
ing to the condition of the cotton market, 
the Fall River factories have been unable 
to pay any dividends to the stockholders ; 
that is, any rent to those who own the 
factories and the machinery. So the di- 
rectors of these factories have reduced the 
wages of the operatives. In effect, they have 
said to them, In the present condition of 
the market, our business is not able to pay 
the rent we have been accustomed to pay to 
the tool owners, and the maintenance we 
have been accustomed to furnish the tool 
users, and we must reduce the wages of the 
tool users in order to pay some rent to the 
tool owners. In this case the demand of 
the administrators of the mill is that the 
loss shall be shared between the two. 

In the famous Pullman strike in Chicago, 
in 1894, the demand was that all losses 
should fall upon the tool users. The Pull- 
man Company paid undiminished divi- 

1 That is, in January, 1905 ; the strike has been at least tem- 
porarily adjusted since this lecture was given. 



Economic Solution — Reorganization 125 

dends to the stockholders and undiminished 
salaries to the higher officials, most of 
whom were large owners of the works ; 
they did not reduce the rent of the houses 
which they rented to the working men, and 
they did reduce the wages of the working 
men. In other words, they said : This 
business is not as prosperous as it was. 
We tool owners will not take any share of 
the diminished prosperity ; you tool users 
must bear the whole loss. No wonder the 
tool users were indignant. It is needless to 
say that I do not excuse the violence to 
which they resorted, and that I do justify 
the action of the government in repressing 
that violence ; but, morally, and in the 
high court of heaven, the capitalistic em- 
ployers were far more responsible for the 
conditions in Chicago in the strike of 1894 
than the laborers whose passions over- 
wrought their judgment, and who allowed 
themselves to be led into a foolish and a 
criminal violation of the law. 

The most intelligent and thoughtful cap- 



1 26 Economic Solution — Reorganization 

italists are beginning to realize clearly what 
the working men have felt blindly ; that 
it is right that both parties to the common 
industrial enterprise should share in its 
prosperity, as both parties to the common 
industry do share in its adversity. The 
tendency of our time is toward a real par- 
ticipation in the profits of the great indus- 
tries. Sometimes this participation is fur- 
nished by making it easy for the workers 
to become shareholders. This, as yet, is 
rare. Sometimes it is furnished by a wages 
dividend, that is, a dividend paid to the 
wage earners proportioned to their wages, 
as the stock dividend is paid to the owners 
in proportion to their stock. Sometimes it 
is furnished by what is called the sliding 
scale, by which the wages of the working 
men are automatically proportioned to the 
rise and fall in the price of the goods pro- 
duced. I believe that this is common in 
certain manufacturing industries. Some- 
times this share in the profits is accom- 
plished by a simple increase of wages fol- 



Economic Solution — Reorganization 127 

lowing increased prosperity of the industry. 
This seems to me the poorest of the four 
methods, because the managers are natu- 
rally reluctant to raise wages with the con- 
sciousness that when the period of prosper- 
ity passes it will be difficult or impossible 
to lower the wages again without resistance 
from the working men, and a consequent 
disastrous industrial complication. 

But it is not necessary, it is not wise, for 
the minister to attempt to determine the 
method in which this financial question 
between the employer and the employed 
may be adjusted. It is not necessary, it is 
not even wise, for him to make himself the 
advocate of a special method of profit shar- 
ing nor, except in extraordinary cases, to 
become the advocate of either the tool 
owner or the tool user when strife arises 
between them. But it is both right and 
wise that we should clearly understand the 
nature of the fundamental question, and 
reach a definite and decided conviction 
upon that question. Is labor a commodity 



1 28 Economic Solution — Reorganization 

to be sold to the capitalist as the machinery 
is sold to the capitalist, or is the laborer a 
man working in fellowship with the cap- 
italist, who is his fellow man, on such 
terms that the profits of every common 
industry shall be shared between the two 
on some just and equitable basis ? I have 
no doubt that the latter is the case. 

This is the financial question between 
capitalist and laborer under the wages 
system. The administrative question is 
more difficult of solution, and perhaps 
more difficult even of statement. 

The organization of industry necessarily 
involves bringing that industry under some 
uniform direction and control. Shall that 
direction and control be autocratic, shall it 
be exercised for the laborers by the capital- 
istic employer, or shall the laborers share 
in that direction and control with the capi- 
talistic employer? Our single shoemaker 
in the village owns his house and his tools, 
and can regulate his hours and conditions of 
labor for himself; but the thousand shoe- 



Economic Solution — Reorganization 1 29 

makers working in a factory must work 
under similar, if not the same, conditions, 
and during substantially the same hours. 
The necessity of working together compels 
the working under some common regula- 
tion. The working men think they have a 
right to some voice in this regulation ; 
they think that the hours and condi- 
tions of labor are not to be autocratically 
determined for them, but are to be deter- 
mined in conference with them. In this 
also I agree with the laborers. 

Autocracy in industry has had a fair trial 
and with disastrous results. It has worked 
no better in industry than it has worked in 
the church and in the state. Autocracy in 
religion produced Italy, Spain, Ireland ; 
autocracy in government produced Egypt 
under the Pharaohs, France, Spain, and 
Italy under the Bourbons, Russia under 
the Czars, 1 What has autocracy in industry 
produced ? In the Louisiana sugar in- 
dustry the laborers were under the auto- 
cratic control of the plantation superintend- 



130 Economic Solution — Reorganization 

ent, popularly called the " slave driver," 
and Mr. James Ford Rhodes tells us that 
under this system the average life of the 
slave was seven years. It was cheaper to 
use up a slave in seven years and buy a new 
one than it was to make such provision for 
his needs as would prolong his life. l At 
the same time the cotton industry of Man- 
chester and Birmingham was carried on 
under the autocratic system. Working 
men lived on the edge of starvation ; 
women were compelled to leave their homes 
to join their husbands in toil in order to 
eke out a scanty subsistence. The school- 
rooms and the playground were robbed of 
the children and the children were robbed 
of their child-life in order to add to the 
inadequate wages of the father. It w r as said 
that the condition of the factory hands in 
England was as bad then as that of the 



1 " Louisiana sugar planters did not hesitate to avow openly 
that, on the whole, they found it the best economy to work off 
their stock of negroes about once in seven years, and then buy 
an entire new set of hands/' — James Ford Ehodes: " History of 
the United States," Vol. I, p. 308. He gives his authorities for 
this statement. 



Economic Solution — Reorganization 131 

slaves on the sugar plantations of Louisiana, 
and this was hardly an exaggeration. l 
Until very recently the sweat-shops on the 
east side of New York have been conducted 
under an autocracy. Those engaged in this 
work had no voice in determining the 
hours of labor, the conditions of labor, or 
the wages to be received for their labor. 
They had to take what was given to them 
and work under whatever conditions were 
provided for them. If you wish to know 
the result read the article by Ray Stannard 
Baker on " The Rise of the Tailors," in a 
recent issue of McClure's Magazine. What 
it meant to the workers is illustrated by a 
Yiddish sweat-shop song which Mr. Baker 
thus translates : 

"I work, work, work without end, 
Why and for whom I know not, 
I care not, I ask not, 
I am a machine." 

What treatment this system accords to 

1 See for description of these conditions Francis A. Walker : 
"The Wages System. " 



132 Economic Solution — Reorganization 

the workers he illustrates by one typical 
incident : 

" In one of these sweat-shops one day, a 
woman worker, in a case I know of, gave 
birth to a child — behind a curtain hung at 
the corner of the hot, noisy room. An- 
other woman had stolen a few moments to 
be with her. The child was born dead. 
When the mother saw that the child was 
dead, she cried out, shrieking, but only for 
a few minutes. Then she dried her eyes. 
' Thank God/ she said. 1 1 could not take 
care of it.' And a few days later she was 
again at her place in the shop. That sort 
of work made brutes of men and women.' J 

The struggle of the unions for what they 
call recognition is not merely a struggle for 
higher wages, or shorter hours. It is a 
struggle to secure the right to have some- 
thing to say upon the question what wages 
shall be paid, what hours prescribed, what 
conditions provided. In the same category 
is to be placed the demand of the unions 
to have something to say on the question 



Economic Solution — Reorganization 133 

whether an individual laborer shall be dis- 
charged or retained. There is the com- 
plaint, in many cases justified by the facts, 
that good workmen are discharged because 
they have been leaders in labor unions, be- 
cause they have taken an active part in se- 
curing for their fellows better wages or 
better conditions. But this is not the 
only, nor even the most fundamental, 
ground for the demand of the labor 
unions. Underlying all their insistence 
upon what they call recognition is this 
fundamental claim to some participation 
in the administration of the industry in 
which they are engaged. 

At the risk of seeming repetition I re- 
state the issue involved. The employer 
who is trying to maintain the principles of 
individual industrialism says : This laborer 
is my servant ; I have hired him. If he 
does not like to work as I want him to 
work he must go and I will supply his 
place with another servant. The la- 
borer, who consciously or unconsciously 



134 Economic Solution — Reorganization 

is endeavoring to apply the principles 
of fraternal industrialism, says : I am 
not your servant, hired by you to do 
your work as you wish it done, You 
and I are partners in a common enter- 
prise. I have a right, not only to some 
share of its profits, but also to some par- 
ticipation in its administration. 

It is not the duty, nor is it wise, for the 
minister to undertake to determine in any 
specific instances whether the working man 
is claiming a larger participation in the ad- 
ministration than he is entitled to, nor to 
decide how the problem of cooperation in 
administration can best be worked out. 
This must necessarily be left to experts 
in the field of industry and probably, in- 
deed almost certainly, the method of par- 
ticipation must be different in different in- 
dustries. But it is right and wise and im- 
portant for the minister to understand 
clearly the nature of this issue between 
individual and fraternal industrialism, and 
to form a clear, definite, and positive 



Economic Solution — Reorganization 135 

conviction on the fundamental question 
whether, in modern, organized industry, 
the laborer should be regarded as a serv- 
ant who is unquestioningly to do the will 
of the employer who hired him, or whether 
he is to be regarded as an individual co- 
operating with the tool owner in an in- 
dustry to be carried on by the two in mu- 
tual agreement. 

A first step toward the solution of our in- 
dustrial problem, then, is the adjustment of 
right relations between the capitalists and 
the laborers, that is, between the tool 
owners and the tool users ; and I have 
no doubt that fundamental to this adjust- 
ment is the recognition by the capitalists 
and laborers alike that they are partners in 
a common enterprise, in the profits of which, 
when there are profits, both are to par- 
ticipate, and in the administration of which 
both are to have some voice. The most 
serious, as it is the most common, cause of 
industrial wars is not the question of hours, 
or of wages; it is mutual suspicion, — jeal- 



136 Economic Solution — Reorganization 

ousy on the one side, ill-concealed con- 
tempt on the other. One of the greatest 
strikes of recent years, and one of great 
peril to the country, was the coal strike 
of 1902. Mr. Carroll D. Wright in his offi- 
cial report to the President thus states 
what was the principal cause of this 
strike : " There is no confidence existing 
between the employees and their employers ; 
a suspicion lurks in the minds of every one 
and distrust in action on every side. 7 ' How 
can the partners in a common enterprise 
work together without constant friction 
and frequent wars when such are the 
conditions ? The first work of the min- 
ister must be to promote the spirit of 
amity and good-will between employer 
and employed. This never can be done 
by what may be called " class " preaching ; 
that is, by preaching to congregations of 
employers about the faults or duties of 
working men, or by preaching to congrega- 
tions of working men about the faults or 
the duties of employers. It is to be done 



Economic Solution — Reorganization 137 

primarily by ignoring, so far as possible, 
all such class distinctions, and so preach- 
ing as to disclose to men their own faults 
and interpret to them their duties to their 
fellow men of every class and every condition. 
But the labor problem will not be finally 
solved by merely securing amicable adjust- 
ment of relations between employer and 
employed. The final industrial solution 
is to be sought for in such a development 
of human character, and such a develop- 
ment of industrial conditions founded 
thereon, that the distinction between tool 
owners and tool users will disappear. The 
tool users will themselves become the tool 
owners, the laborers will themselves be- 
come the capitalists, and in so far as there 
are still capitalists who are not laborers, 
the conditions of individual industrialism 
will be reversed : under individual indus- 
trialism labor was a commodity which the 
capitalists hired ; under democratic indus- 
trialism capital will be a commodity which 
the laborer will hire. 



138 Economic Solution — Reorganization 

I can best make this issue clear by 
indicating some of the steps in this process 
of industrial development and some of the 
principles which underlie it. 

1. There are certain elements of wealth 
in the country which by the artificial 
arrangements of society we have made 
private property, but which, on principles 
of abstract right, belong to all the people. 
One problem which confronts us is how 
to undo the evil which has been wrought 
by allowing this public wealth to become 
private property. To do this without a 
revolution which would be unjust to 
present owners, and disastrous to the 
nation, is a very difficult problem. I 
believe that no human problem is un- 
solvable ; but here I can do little more 
than to state the nature and conditions 
of this problem and one way toward its 
solution. 1 

Every man has a right to the product 



*I have treated this subject more fully in u The Rights of 
Man," Chap. IV,— " Industrial Rights." 



Economic Solution — Reorganization 139 

of his own industry because it is a part of 
himself; into it he has put a portion of 
his own life. But there are certain things 
in the world which are not the product 
of man's industry and to which, therefore, 
the individual man has no natural right. 
If he has any right in them it is due to 
artificial arrangements of society. Air, 
light, the ocean, the navigable rivers, come 
in this category. So do the land and its 
contents. These are not the products of 
industry : man did not make the hills of 
Pennsylvania and the coal stored therein ; 
nor the hills of California and Colorado 
and the gold and silver stored therein ; 
nor the prairies of the great West and the 
juices of the earth stored therein ; nor the 
great forests of Wisconsin and California. 
These were not made by man ; they were 
created for man. This is equally true of 
the great forces of nature, — light, heat, 
electricity. The machines by which these 
forces are made available are man-made, 
but the forces are not man-made. A third 



140 Economic Solution — Reorganization 

source of value which it is true man has 
made, but which has not been made by 
any individual man but by the entire 
community, is the public franchise. The 
state gives to a corporation the right to 
take possession of a strip of land extend- 
ing from New York to Buffalo and to lay 
a railroad track upon it ; to another cor- 
poration the right to lay its tracks in the 
city streets and run its cars upon them. 
This right is a creation of the state ; the 
value inherent in this right belongs 
naturally to the state ; it is only as the 
state parts with this right that the corpora- 
tion becomes entitled to it. It is not a 
product of the corporation's activity ; it is 
a grant by the state. 

Now the chief sources of the enormous in- 
dividual wealth in this country are these 
three : land, natural forces, state franchises. 
The multi-millionaires have accumulated 
their multi-millions, not chiefly as a product 
of their own industry ; they have accumu- 
lated them by getting possession and control 



Economic Solution — Reorganization 141 

of the land and its contents, the natural 
forces of the world, and the franchises which 
the state has created. Cornelius Vanderbilt 
is said to have been worth two hundred 
millions of dollars at the time of his death. 
If Adam was born six thousand years ago 
and had lived to this day and had worked 
every working day for that six thousand 
years and had laid up one hundred dollars 
a day over and above his own maintenance, 
he would not have accumulated as large a 
fortune as Cornelius Vanderbilt accumu- 
lated in a lifetime. This fortune was not 
accumulated by Cornelius Vanderbilt's pro- 
ductive industry. It was accumulated by 
his ability to get possession of land values, 
the natural force values, and the franchise 
values, all of which naturally belonged to all 
the people. I do not blame Cornelius Van- 
derbilt for getting possession of them. I do 
not blame the people for parting with them. 
The people were not as wise a hundred years 
ago as they ought to be to-day ; but they 
will be foolish if they continue to part with 



H 2 Economic Solution — Reorganization 

these values now that they have seen the 
result of parting with them. No state or 
city ought to grant a franchise except for a 
limited term. The growth in the value of 
the franchise belongs to the people and that 
value the people ought to retain. A few 
years ago New York City gave to a railroad 
company liberty to lay tracks in its streets, 
and this liberty gave to the railway com- 
pany a practical monopoly of a large pro- 
portion of the passenger traffic of those 
streets. It gave the franchise away in ig- 
norance of the value which that franchise 
possessed. Five or six years ago it made a 
contract with a corporation to build a sub- 
way under the streets. It issued bonds 
bearing a rate of interest of three and a-half 
per cent, in order to raise the money for 
the construction of this subway. It leased 
the subway to the corporation for fifty years 
at such a rental that at the end of fifty years 
the cost of the subway and the interest on 
the cost will be paid back to the city, and 
the city will own the subway without hav- 



Economic Solution — Reorganization 143 

ing spent a dollar of its own money. It will 
own the subway simply by having loaned 
its credit for a limited term of years. These 
two contrasted instances indicate in a con- 
crete form what I mean when I say that the 
franchise values belong to the people, and 
that in the future the people should never 
grant a perpetual franchise, certainly not 
without some rental and some provision for 
a re- valuation of the franchise and readjust- 
ment of the rental from time to time. 

The patent laws of our country give to 
the inventor who has discovered a new 
method of utilizing the forces of nature, an 
absolute right to control that method for a 
limited number of years. This practically 
gives to the inventor, — or quite as often to 
the shrewd business man who has been able 
to get possession of the invention, — a con- 
trol of the forces of nature which are essen- 
tial to modern well-being. They are wiser 
in England. In England the patent is 
granted as it is in this country, but the pat- 
entee is compelled to allow the use of his 



144 Economic Solution — Reorganization 

invention at a price fixed upon by the 
court, if he and the person desiring it can- 
not agree upon a price. This simple pro- 
vision has been sufficient to prevent prohib- 
itory prices upon patented articles. Some 
such provision would prevent us from suf- 
fering from monopolies due to patent laws. 

Similarly our public lands and their con- 
tents, — the mines, the forests, the prairies,— 
have, to a large extent, passed into private 
hands by public gift. What we have given 
we cannot in honor take back, but we can 
cease the continuance of a policy which de- 
prives the people at large of these values 
which are not man-made but God-given. 

But we can do more than this. 

We can levy a reasonable rate of taxation 
on the franchises, on the great patents, and 
on land values. A tax which amounts to 
immediate confiscation cannot be justified, 
but a policy of taxation which in the first 
place compels every franchise value, patent 
value, and land value, to pay in proportion 
to its value as other values pay, is abso- 



Economic Solution — Reorganization 145 

lutely right ; and a system of taxation which 
eventually should recover to the people the 
values of the franchises, the patents, and the 
lands which our fathers gave away, would 
not be unrighteous, if it were so arranged 
that private enterprise and private interests 
could adjust themselves to it. The laws of 
one generation ought not to be permitted to 
bind all future generations. To permit this 
is to prevent any possible rectification of the 
evils inflicted by the imperfect knowledge 
of an earlier time, and to impair, if not to 
prevent, all industrial progress. 1 

2. A second step toward the better distri- 
bution of wealth, that is, toward that era when 
the tool users will become the tool owners, 
is a radical reform in our system of taxa- 
tion. Indirect taxation levies the taxes on 
expenditures, and so long as the great mass 
of taxes is levied by indirect taxation, so 
long they will be levied on expenditures. 



1 The reader who desires to pursue further this question of 
public rights in natural values will find the material for such 
investigation in Henry George's "Progress and Poverty " and 
in Thomas T. Sherman's "Natural Taxation." 



146 Economic Solution — Reorganization 

The poor man does not expend as much as 
the rich man, but his expenditure in pro- 
portion to his income is vastly greater. The 
man who has $500 income a year needs to 
sleep as warmly as the man who has $500,- 
000, and although he does not pay as much 
for his coarse blankets as the millionaire, 
the millionaire does not pay one thousand 
times as much as the poor man. The poor 
man must have an overcoat that will keep 
him as warm as the rich man ; his heart 
beats with the same measure and his blood 
needs to be kept at the same heat. He does 
not spend as much for his overcoat and 
does not have as many, but the rich man 
does not have a thousand overcoats to the 
poor man's one, though his income be $500,- 
000 and the poor man's $500. If, therefore, 
we levy a tax on clothing, the poor man 
pays far more in proportion to his income 
than the rich man pays. Taxation ought 
to be levied in proportion to income, not in 
proportion to expenditure. 

And it ought to be levied rather on the 



Economic Solution — Reorganization 147 

income that comes from permanent invest- 
ment than on the income that comes from 
personal industry, whether that personal in- 
dustry is industry of the hand or of the 
brain ; and for this very simple reason : 
Government does more for the man who has 
large investments than it does for the man 
who has none. The landlord who owns a 
thousand houses has a thousand houses to 
be protected ; the man who owns the one 
house in which he lives and no other, has 
but one house to be protected ; the man who 
lives in a single suite of rooms in an apart- 
ment house has a single floor to be pro- 
tected. The man with the large investments 
asks government to do a great deal more for 
him than the man with few investments 
or with none at all, and he ought therefore 
in justice to pay a larger proportion of the 
expenses of the government. Tax on indus- 
try is a discouragement to industry in so 
far, and the tax ought to be levied, first, on 
the income, not on the expenditure, and 
secondly, rather on the income that comes 



148 Economic Solution — Reorganization 

from investments than on the income that 
comes from industry, whether of brain or of 
brawn. 

3. With these economic reforms of a 
public nature must be combined those of a 
more private and personal nature. 

Money may be regarded either as an 
instrument for pleasure or as an element 
of power. Those who regard it as an in- 
strument for pleasure will spend it as fast 
as they make it. Those who regard it as an 
element of power will accumulate it and 
employ it as a tool in their industry. 
Money is accumulated industry. It is the 
product of industry salted down and 
reserved for future use. The men who 
thus accumulate the products of their 
industry in time acquire the ownership 
of the tools with which the industry of 
the world must be carried on. There are 
thousands of men in America who have 
no conception of this use of money, and 
they must be taught it. This is the essen- 
tial principle underlying what we call 



Economic Solution — Reorganization 149 

thrift. Thrift must be taught, not merely, 
perhaps not mainly, by homilies from the 
pulpit, though I am persuaded that the 
pulpit in its exaltation of the virtue of 
generosity has failed to lay the stress it 
ought to lay on the virtues of industry 
and economy. But there are virtues 
which can be taught outside the church 
better than within it. 

Men will learn thrift through a savings 
bank who will not learn it through a 
pulpit. In the public schools of France 
and Austria savings banks for the children 
are in use. They have now been intro- 
duced to a limited extent in the public 
schools of this country. Every such sav- 
ings bank not merely helps the child to 
save for future use the money which before 
was spent in the candy shop, but it edu- 
cates him to perceive that money is an 
element of power, not simply an instru- 
ment for pleasure, and develops in him 
the capacity to deny himself a present 
enjoyment for the sake of a future use- 



\ 



150 Economic Solution — Reorganization 

fulness. We ought to have in this country 
as they have in England a postal savings 
bank. I believe the bankers oppose the 
postal savings bank lest it should interfere 
with the private savings bank. I think 
that this opposition, so far as it exists, is 
short-sighted. Experience indicates that 
many working men are more anxious to 
have their savings safe than to have them 
pay a remunerative rate of interest. If 
the post-office would simply take the 
money of the depositor and hold it for 
him without interest until it reached such 
a sum that he thought it worth while to 
open with it a savings bank account, thrift 
would be encouraged. A number of years 
ago I traveled from Easton, New Jersey to 
Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania, and on that 
whole journey there was not a single 
savings bank, but there were plenty of 
liquor saloons to be seen. Men could 
spend their money for pleasure whenever 
they chose, but the only way they could 
save their money was to tie it up in a 



Economic Solution — Reorganization 1 5 1 

stocking, or put it in a trunk. That con- 
dition may no longer exist ; I hope it does 
not ; it ought not to exist in any section 
of the country. It ought to be as easy for 
a man to deposit his money in safety for 
future use as it is to mail a letter. 

4. In some respects more important 
than either of the reforms I have men- 
tioned is that broader system of education 
upon which we are entering. The man 
who can furnish only muscular force to 
industrial enterprise comes in competition 
with the great forces of nature. As men 
rise in the moral and intellectual scale 
God takes their drudgery from them. 
Two women sit on the ground in Palestine 
laboriously turning one grindstone upon 
another, grinding the grist for the two 
homes which they represent. The Ameri- 
can harnesses his mill to the upper falls 
of the Mississippi River and sends out 
from the mill thousands of barrels of flour 
daily. God grinds his wheat and his corn 
for him. The North American Indian 



15 2 Economic Solution — Reorganization 

journeys through a trail in the forest, 
twenty or thirty miles in a day. The 
modern American gets into a Pullman 
car, and in twenty hours is transported 
from New York to Chicago. God has 
carried him a thousand miles. The man 
who can contribute nothing but muscular 
power to the organization of modern so- 
ciety is the woman in Palestine and the 
Indian on the trail. It is necessarily diffi- 
cult for him to contribute as much to the 
wealth of society as he must take out of 
the common stock to maintain his life. 
Education develops brain power; indus- 
trial education develops a kind of brain 
power which can be employed in the 
production of wealth. The better the 
education and the greater the ability to 
apply that brain power in the production 
of wealth the greater share the individual 
can contribute to the common stock, and 
the greater dividend he can take from the 
common product. 

5. With these reforms we need to com- 



Economic Solution — Reorganization 153 

bine another : such an organization of 
industry and such an impregnation of our 
industrial system with honesty and fair 
dealing that men who can produce more 
than they consume and who have learned 
how to save the surplus of their industry, 
regarding it as an element of power not as 
an instrument for pleasure, can safely invest 
it in the great industrial organizations. 
They are already doing this directly or in- 
directly to an extent unparalleled in the 
previous industrial history of the world. 
The total number of depositors in savings 
banks for the year 1890 was over 4,250,000, 
with an average deposit of over $350 each. 
This money, I hardly need to remind you, 
does not lie idle in the vaults of the savings 
banks. It is loaned out to industrial enter- 
prises, so that the owners of these savings 
banks deposits are indirectly part owners of 
the tools with which the industry of the 
country is carried on. But these figures do 
not adequately represent the extent to 
which tool users are also tool owners. 



154 Economic Solution — Reorganization 

Much of the bonds and the stock which 
represent the tools employed by the great 
mines, factories, and railroads is divided 
among a great number of bondholders and 
stockholders who thus are tool owners. At 
present thrifty and intelligent working men 
rightly fear to invest their surplus earnings 
in industrial organizations because indus- 
trial organizations have been so often man- 
aged, not in the interest of the owners, but 
against their interests. Laws prohibiting 
stock-watering, laws requiring publicity of 
account-keeping, laws holding the directors 
of great corporations to a stricter accounta- 
bility for their actions, laws bringing them 
under governmental supervision, as the 
banks are now brought under governmental 
supervision, would help to make invest- 
ments in active industries as safe as now are 
investments in savings banks. But what is 
far more important than laws is a public 
opinion which shall pillory every man, 
however great his wealth, if it has been 
accumulated by dishonest, underhand, and 



Economic Solution — Reorganization 155 

corrupt methods ; — a public opinion which 
shall call men robbers however great the 
sum they have accumulated by their acts of 
robbery. 

A few years ago, as the result of in- 
quiries, I learned that the number of stock- 
holders in the Pennsylvania Railroad and 
the number of persons employed by the 
Pennsylvania Railroad were about the 
same. If the employees had been the 
stockholders in the Pennsylvania Railroad 
the contest between the tool owners and 
the tool users would no longer exist ; the 
tool users would have become the tool 
owners. This, I believe, is the ultimate in- 
dustrial solution of our labor problem. It 
is such a distribution of wealth, based on 
universal integrity, intelligence, and thrift, 
that the men who carry on the industries 
by the concurrent action of their brains and 
their hands, will, through the modern 
invention of the corporation, become the 
owners of the tools with which that indus- 
try is carried on, and there will be an end 



156 Economic Solution — Reorganization 

to the strife between capitalists and laborers 
because the laborers will themselves have 
become the capitalists. 1 

Let me restate the ground which we have 
thus far covered in these three lectures. In 
the first lecture I attempted to show that 
the organization of labor and of capital 
are essential elements in the progress of 
mankind, and mark a higher and better 
social and industrial development than that 
of the era of individual industrialism from 
which we are emerging ; that we cannot go 
back if we would, and we should not if we 
could. In the second lecture I attempted 
to show that the era of organization in- 
volves danger from monopoly ; that wher- 
ever combination is possible, competition is 



1 The tendency in America appears to be toward this better 
distribution of wealth. Carroll D. Wright estimates that " the 
rich in America own now a smaller part of the total than forty 
years ago."— G. L. Bolen : " Plain Facts as to Trusts," p. 236. 
The great plantations in the South are being taken up into 
small holdings ; the same process is apparently going on, 
though less rapidly, in the far West. Nearly half the families 
in America own the land they occupy, a land distribution un- 
equaled in any great nation in the history of the past. See on 
this whole subject, Charles D. Spaler, " Present Distribution of 
Wealth in the United States." 



Economic Solution — Reorganization 157 

impossible ; that the remedy for the dan- 
gers threatened by monopoly is not the re- 
establishment of competition but govern- 
ment regulation and control of the great 
combinations, whether of capitalists or of 
laborers. In this third lecture I have at- 
tempted to show that the labor problem 
is really the question, What should be 
the relations between capitalists and la- 
borers ? and that the answer to that ques- 
tion is twofold : so long as society is di- 
vided into these two classes of tool owners 
and tool users, the relation between them is 
that of partners in a common enterprise ; 
but the ultimate ideal toward which we 
should direct our ethical teaching, and our 
social and industrial reforms is an ideal in 
which the distinction between capitalists and 
laborers will be abolished, because the la- 
borers or tool users will have become capi- 
talists or tool owners. In the next and last 
lecture of the course I shall consider the 
ethical issue involved in the industrial 
problem, and the specific message with 



1 58 Economic Solution — Reorganization 

which the minister in our time should 
consider himself charged, in order to meet 
the difficulties and dangers involved in the 
present industrial situation. 



IV 

THE ETHICAL SOLUTION— REGEN- 
ERATION 



IV 

THE ETHICAL SOLUTION— REGENERATION 

In traveling from Mt. Blanc to Geneva 
the diligence stops at a certain point to 
change horses. A group of wayside boys 
swarm out on the roadside ; some turn cart- 
wheels, some walk upon their hands or stand 
upon their heads, some simply hold a ragged 
cap in hand, and the passengers upon the 
coach rain down upon them coppers for 
which the boys eagerly scramble. The 
episode is soon over. A few boys with 
their hands full of coppers, smiling at 
their success, the others, smaller and 
feebler, without a penny and with dis- 
appointed faces, watch the diligence as 
it rolls away. 

As, some years ago, I looked upon this 
scene it seemed to me a parable of one 
phase of American life. God has stored 
this continent with unmeasured wealth of 



162 The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 

prairies and forests, of coal and oil and 
precious metals, of waterfalls for power, 
great navigable streams for highways, and 
well-protected harbors for foreign com- 
merce ; and her millions of men are en- 
gaged in a busy and not always scrupu- 
lous struggle to see who shall get the larger 
share of this common wealth. Some by 
their productive industry are said to create 
the wealth, though really they only make 
it available for human use. Some by cun- 
ning craft or power seize on the common 
wealth before their fellows, or by various 
forms of dishonesty, legal or illegal, take it 
from their fellows, after the latter have 
gotten possession of it. Some engage in 
the scramble with great joy, some are 
forced into it by the necessity of main- 
taining an existence. Some, unable or un- 
willing to engage in the strife, stand outside 
and take what their successful fellows may 
choose to give to them. These we call the 
dependent classes. Some retire from the 
common war, bruised and with empty 



The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 163 

pockets and aching hearts ; some with 
their hands and their pockets so full 
that it requires all their skill to keep 
what they have gotten, and their skill 
does not suffice to make their possessions 
available to them. 

Out of this scramble for wealth grow 
certain of our great national problems. 

We put a tariff wall about our country, 
the effect of which is to say to the rest of 
the world : You cannot join in this Amer- 
ican game unless you come to America 
and become Americans. Then you may. 
And men from abroad, seeing the game, 
and thinking that if they come they can 
get, if not for themselves at least for their 
children, a fair share of prizes, come here 
in a long procession to add their brain and 
brawn to the battle. Out of this grows our 
immigrant problem. 

Successful men, who have already ac- 
cumulated their millions, and who have 
discovered that money, even more than 
knowledge, is power, join their millions to 



164 The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 

increase their chance of success, as a few of 
the stronger boys in the Swiss scramble 
might join to shove the smaller boys to one 
side, and divide the spoil which their com- 
mon strength gave to them. Out of this 
grows the trust problem. 

Other men, less fortunate, but on whose 
hand-work the development of the natural 
wealth of the country depends, join them- 
selves together in labor organizations, to 
resist what they regard as the aggressions 
of their richer and stronger fellows, or per- 
haps even to combine with them in secur- 
ing a larger share of the natural wealth of 
the country. Out of these combinations of 
labor with capital or against capital, grows 
our labor problem. 

It is necessary to keep some order in this 
struggling crowd, and the greater the strug- 
gle the stronger must be the government 
whose function it is to keep such order. 
This government requires a certain share 
of the common wealth for its maintenance. 
To secure the aid of this government special 



The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 165 

interests are willing to pay large prices. 
Men who have an aptitude for a certain 
kind of government, or perhaps merely no 
aptitude for honest business, go into poli- 
tics, as one of them has said, for what they 
can make out of it. Out of this grow pub- 
lic corruption and those political problems 
which public corruption presents. 

This struggle is not altogether sordid. 
Different motives combine to inspire the 
participants. A few enter it merely for the 
money. The} 7 wish to heap together the 
coin and enjoy the possession of it. But of 
such there are very few ; Americans are 
not misers. If they are enthusiastic in 
amassing wealth, they are also free in ex- 
penditure. More join in the game for the 
joy which victory gives. Wealth is a meas- 
ure of success. To be wealthy is to be hon- 
ored, or respected, or at least feared, and 
the sound of popular applause is sweet to 
all men. Still more enter into the struggle 
for the mere love of the game ; as one suc- 
cessful business man once said to me, 



166 The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 

" There is more fun in making money than 
in either possessing it or spending it." The 
excitements of business are to such men 
like the excitements of Monte Carlo to the 
gambler. Money is the symbol which tes- 
tifies to success. Still others are forced into 
the struggle in order to earn a livelihood 
for themselves and those who are depend- 
ent on them. Their life is not in their 
industry, their industry is pursued only 
because it is necessary to enable them to 
live. Some look beyond the money, the 
applause, the excitement, the immediate 
necessity, and consider seriously what this 
money for which they are struggling will 
secure for them. They see more or less 
clearly that money is but a means, not an 
end, and to that end they really direct their 
energies in their struggle to acquire the 
means. What is this end to which money 
is a means ? What will this money buy ? 
What is the true secret of its value ? 

I hold in my hand a piece of paper on 
which are printed the words, " Five Dbl- 



The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 1 67 

lars." Why is this anymore desirable than 
any other piece of paper of similar size and 
quality ? Because I can go to the bank and 
get for it a five dollar gold piece. 

I go to the bank and get the five dollar 
gold piece. Why is this five dollar gold piece 
more desirable than any other disk of any 
other metal of similar size? Because, as 
the result of a common agreement entered 
into by all participants in this game, I can 
exchange it for whatever things I want. I 
cannot eat it, but it will procure me food ; 
nor wear it, but it will procure me clothes ; 
nor live under it, but it will procure me 
shelter ; nor travel in it, but it will procure 
me transportation ; nor read it, but it will 
procure me books. This disk of gold is 
like the wishing cap of the fairy tale. I 
have but to produce it and there lies on 
my table whatever I wish for — food, cloth- 
ing, shelter, travel, literature, art, music, for 
myself, for my friends, for my fellow men. 

Can we classify these objects of our desire 
so as to see more broadly what this gold 



168 The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 

will procure for us? I think we can. 
They all fall into three great categories ; 
means of pleasure, instruments of power, 
and opportunities for service. 

Give a small boy a penny, it will go for 
candy ; give a grown-up boy a dime, it will 
go for beer ; give him a five dollar piece, it 
will go for champagne. In the develop- 
ment of the race as in the individual this 
is the first use to which money is put, — the 
obtaining of pleasure. There are thou- 
sands and probably millions of men in 
this country who have no idea, — certainly 
no clear idea — of any use of money other 
than to get through its acquisition some 
form of personal comfort and enjoyment 
for themselves, or perhaps for those who are 
near and dear to them. There are but few 
Americans who believe in the Beatitudes ; 
but few who really believe with Jesus Christ 
that the secret of happiness is character, not 
possessions. 

Money is also an instrument of power. 
Money buys tools ; without tools the hand- 



The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 169 

worker cannot work. When he owns the 
tools he controls the industry which de- 
pends upon these tools. He owns the 
farm, the mine, the cotton factory, the rail- 
road. No one can cultivate the farm, or 
extract the ore from the mine, or work 
at the spindle, or travel on the iron high- 
way, without his consent. The multi-mil- 
lionaire is not so foolish as some moralists 
would have us suppose. He knows what 
he is after, — power. The feudal lords of 
our time are the multi-millionaires ; the 
barons are coal barons ; the magnates are 
trust magnates ; the kings are railroad 
kings. Their existence marks an upward 
stage in moral development, because the 
desire for power indicates a higher ethical 
stage in development than the desire for 
pleasure. Ambition is a nobler motive 
than love of pleasure. It is better to in- 
vest one's money in stocks than in either 
beer or champagne. 

Money also brings with it opportunities 
for service. As it may be used for good or 



170 The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 

evil pleasures, for useful or injurious 
power, so it may be used in beneficent or 
maleficent service. It may establish a 
soup house, or endow a library : in one 
case it will impoverish men, in the other 
case it will educate them : in one case it 
will rob them of self-respect, in the other 
case it will develop in them self-reliance. 

And this brings me to the very simple 
truth which I wish to put before you ; 
that wealth — not merely money, but 
wealth, — that is, the objects that money will 
buy, whether pleasure, power or opportu- 
nity for service, are available only as they 
minister to the higher life of men. 
Wealth is the abundance of things, and 
things are for men, not men for things. 
The value of things depends upon their 
power to minister to the life of men. 

The babe has come into the home. 
Shall we clothe him in cotton? or wool? 
or silk? Nothing is too good for him. 
Let us buy him the most costly, the most 
luxurious. No ! we will buy him the most 



The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 1 7 1 

hygienic, that which will administer most 
to his healthful life. Shall we rock him 
in the cradle? I believe that modern 
science says no ; train him to go to sleep 
in a bed. What soups and jellies and 
wine shall we buy for our king? Milk. 
Only milk ? Yes, only milk ; for soups 
and jellies and wines will sicken and 
kill him, and milk is the diet that will 
best minister to his growing life. He 
grows to boyhood ; he has his kite, his 
knife, his bat and ball, presently his lawn 
tennis, then his golf sticks and his foot- 
ball. Why? Because his kite will take 
him out into the open air, his knife will 
give him his first lessons in handicraft, his 
ball and tennis and golf sticks will develop 
his muscles and his lungs and his heart, 
and his football his courage. Who thinks 
that the boy is made for his toys ? Who 
does not know that the toys are made for 
the boy? He goes to college. At his 
disposal are all its varied apparatus, — the 
gymnasium, the laboratory, the observa- 



i7 2 The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 

tory, the library. Why has this college 
been thus endowed ? Why have these 
laboratories and this library been built? 
Clearly to help make a man of him, to 
teach him the nature of the world of 
matter in which he lives and the world of 
men with whom he lives. No one imag- 
ines that this boy is made for the college, 
least of all does he himself fall into any 
such ludicrous delusion. The college is for 
him, not he for the college. He is to use 
the books, though they are worn in the 
using ; and the laboratories, though their 
apparatus is sometimes destroyed by his 
blunders. 

He finishes his education and goes out 
into the world, and now suddenly his point 
of view undergoes a change. He thinks he 
is made for things, not things for him. He 
thinks he has been educated to build bridges, 
construct engines, survey new roads, rear 
twenty-story sky-scrapers ; or, if not to build 
these things, then to administer them when 
they have been built, and to measure his 



The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 173 

success by the number, the amount, the 
value, of the things which he can accumu- 
late, administer, control, possess. If he gets 
more things than his neighbors he is more 
successful than they. If he gets few or none 
he has failed. To these material construc- 
tions, or to his possession and administra- 
tion of them, he points as his achievements. 
To acquire them is his ambition, for them 
he lives, by them he is measured by his fel- 
lows, and by them he measures himself. 
These things which he and his fellows have 
made appear to him the glory of his coun- 
try. They make the triumph of trium- 
phant democracy. His country is great be- 
cause of its enormous territory, its mineral 
deposits, its rich agricultural products and 
extensive farm lands, and the skill of men in 
cutting down timber, extracting the ore, pro- 
ducing the harvests. It is great because of 
the colossal value of its factories and its rail- 
roads, and the millions of dollars of its ex- 
ports. The glory of the nursery was not 
the cradle, but the baby ; the glory of the 



174 The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 

playground was not the ball, but the pitcher ; 
the glory of the college was not the library 
and the laboratories, but the collegiate ; but 
the glory of the city is the lofty warehouses, 
not the life of honor and truth and service 
which goes on in them ; and the glory of 
the capitol is the domed statehouse, not the 
conduct of the legislators who make the 
laws therein ; and the glory of the country 
is the multitude and the value of its fac- 
tories and mills and railroads, not the intel- 
ligence and energy of the men who work in 
the one and travel on the other. 

What folly ! Is it not a splendid achieve- 
ment that one can travel from Chicago to 
New York in twenty hours ? That depends 
altogether upon who the traveler is and what 
he does at his journey's end. If he carries 
a dynamite bomb to put on board an ocean 
steamer, New York would prefer that he 
never got there at all. Is it not a splendid 
achievement that we can telegraph under 
the sea the news of the day from America 
to England ? That depends altogether upon 



The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 1 75 

what the news is. If it is the story of a 
slugging match, the fewer who know it and 
the greater the difficulty in transmitting the 
message the better. 

This measuring of life by material values, 
which ends in bringing spiritual realities to 
material standards for their measurement 
has sometimes humorous, sometimes horri- 
fying, illustrations. An ignorant but suc- 
cessful miner of California built him a great 
house with a great picture gallery. A 
neighbor who had a fine collection of paint- 
ings, including some of the old masters, and 
who was compelled to sell, offered his col- 
lection to the millionaire. After due con- 
sideration it was declined. " I have talked 
it over with my wife," he said, " and our 
conclusion is that as we have a brand new 
house and a brand new gallery we do not 
want any second hand pictures ! " I visited 
once, a few years ago, one of the great ho- 
tels of America. A valet took the visiting 
party about. " This tapestry," he said, " is 
from Persia, it cost so many thousand dol- 



176 The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 

lars ; this bedstead belongs to the age of 
Louis XV, it cost so many thousand dollars." 
Finally he put before us an ivory crucifix. 
It was carved, he said, by a certain Italian 
master. " See how beautifully the agony 
is depicted on the face. It cost a hundred 
thousand dollars." 

This is the folly which is the fever and the 
curse of America ; — this putting things be- 
fore life, or rather, thinking only of things, 
and of life not at all. It promotes luxury 
in the rich, and self-indulgence alike in rich 
and poor. It fosters in man the feverish 
desire to get something for nothing, the 
eager passion to get rich quickly, the gam- 
bling passion in all classes, from the specu- 
lator on 'Change to the gamester at roulette, 
or the more fashionable gamester at the 
whist table. It incites men to combine in 
labor unions, not to promote industrial 
freedom but to prevent it ; and other men 
in capitalistic unions, not to promote pro- 
duction and distribution, but to check both. 
It is the parent of monopoly ; it sets indi- 



The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 177 

vidual against individual in envy, jealousy, 
and all uncharitableness. It sets class 
against class in labor wars. It breeds op- 
pression and lawlessness in capitalists, and 
rioting, arson, and murder in laborers. It 
creates bosses, builds self-seeking political 
machines, bribes legislators, endeavors to 
buy judges. It is the prolific source of cor- 
ruption and blackmail. It perverts educa- 
tional institutions, measures colleges by 
their equipment and endowment, not by the 
men they graduate ; newspapers by the length 
of their subscription lists and the amount 
of their advertising patronage, not by the 
principles they advocate. It enters the 
church, measures it by its pew rents, and in 
our great cities divides the churches into 
first and second classes ; teaches the young 
false estimates of life and false standards of 
character ; and incites in young and old, 
rich and poor, brain-worker and hand- 
worker alike, an ambition that degrades in 
lieu of an ambition that inspires, elevates 
and spiritualizes. 



178 The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 

It is easy to see some of the forces which 
have contributed and are still contributing 
to create this false standard and incite this 
false ambition. This is a new country. 
The first duty of a pioneer people in a new 
country is to attend to material conditions ; 
to build the house, cultivate the farm, con- 
struct the road. Necessity lays this duty 
upon all pioneer populations. We have 
not wholly gotten over this necessity in 
America, and we have not at all gotten over 
the impulse which this necessity has given 
to us. There is coming to America and 
growing up here an immense population 
which is just learning the value of material 
things and those economic virtues on which 
we depend for material prosperity. Mil- 
lions of immigrants who in the Old World 
never knew what it is to have a comfort- 
able house to live in, abundance of food 
to eat, adequate clothing to wear, and what 
is more than all, the joy of possession, are 
just acquiring this knowledge, and in the 
process are passing from that dull despair 



The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 179 

which men miscall content to that feverish 
ambition which men miscall aspiration. 
The negro race is beginning to acquire 
some knowledge and will soon catch from 
its white competitor the same fever. The 
sudden acquisition of immense fortunes by 
a Carnegie, a Rockefeller, a Vanderbilt, 
startle and dazzle men. They are blinded 
by the brilliance of the achievement and 
eager to imitate them. Most men walk by 
sight, not by faith. Achievements in the 
material world are seen, known, recognized 
by every one. The invisible achievements 
are seen, comprehended, appreciated only 
by the few. Every man can see and under- 
stand the work of a Vanderbilt, not every 
one the work of an Emerson. The light 
which a Rockefeller has put into a million 
homes shines out where all the world can 
see it. The light which a Henry Ward 
Beecher or a Phillips Brooks has put into a 
million hearts is unseen, and even those 
who possess it scarcely know whence it 
came. 



180 The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 

We can do something to mitigate the 
evils of this materialistic life of ours. We 
can enact certain rules of the game and 
compel the contestants to play fair. We 
can prohibit some forms of gambling and 
do something to discourage other and per- 
haps more dangerous forms. We can bring 
trusts under legal regulations which will 
limit, if they do not entirely destroy, mo- 
nopolies, and trade unions under regula- 
tions which will restrain, and perhaps 
entirely prevent, the more open and odious 
forms of violation of personal and individ- 
ual rights. We can do yet more by an 
industrial reform which shall bring about 
by gradual processes a more pacific and a 
more equable distribution of wealth ; which 
shall give the hand laborer a larger propor- 
tion of the profits of the industry, and shall 
reserve more hours from the drudgery of 
toil for the home and for self-culture. 

But the real remedy must be deeper and 
more fundamental. We might put an um- 
pire to watch the game of the sturdy Swiss 



The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 181 

beggars and compel them to play fair. We 
might possibly persuade them that they 
would all do better by coming to some 
agreement for a peaceable division of the 
profits rained down upon them from the 
coach-top. But the wise man would, if he 
could, persuade them to leave their begging 
game altogether and go to school. You are 
wasting your time, boys, he would say to 
them. The coppers are worth nothing in 
comparison with an education. Spend your 
time in getting character, not in a struggle 
for charity. 

Something like this should be the mes- 
sage of the American pulpit to the American 
people. Publicists may contrive laws for 
the regulation of the game, industrial re- 
formers may endeavor to set in motion 
forces for a fairer and more peaceable di- 
vision of material profits ; but the real and 
fundamental change will come only in a 
general recognition of the principle that 
things are made for man, not man for 
things. And this principle must not be in- 



182 The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 

culcated only by the men in the pulpit and 
emphasized in the book, the periodical, and 
the newspaper ; it must be wrought into the 
political, the industrial, and the social, fabric 
of the nation by the faith and the life of its 
true leaders. No duty to-day is more vital 
than this. No problem is more pressing on 
all high-minded men and women than the 
problem, what is to be done to prevent the 
declination of a great republic, founded by 
idealists and endowed with noble ideals, 
into a mere money-making corporation, a 
mere struggle of competing and sometimes 
unscrupulous combinations of men for the 
largest possible share of the common wealth 
with which God has equipped the American 
continent. 

In this endeavor there are two funda- 
mental principles inculcated by Christ 
upon which the Christian minister has 
an especial call to lay stress. 

The first is the principle enunciated by 
Him in the sentence, " Is not life more than 
meat, and the body than raiment? " 



The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 183 

Jesus put little value upon either the 
treasures which money will buy, or the 
power with which money will equip. He 
did not condemn pleasure. He did not 
draw a line between different classes of 
pleasure : prohibit some and permit others. 
He set the principle of His own life in sharp 
contradistinction to the life of John the Bap- 
tist, saying of John, " He came neither eat- 
ing nor drinking, but the Son of Man came 
both eating and drinking." His biographers 
do not recall a single instance in which He 
declined an invitation to a feast, but more 
than one instance in which He accepted 
such invitations. His first miracle was the 
making of water into wine in order to pro- 
long the festivities of a marriage occasion. 
He compared Himself to one playing in the 
market place that the children might dance 
to the music. Again and again He com- 
pared the Kingdom of God to a great sup- 
per. He described the father receiving the 
returning prodigal with music and dancing. 
Neither did He condemn the acquisition and 



184 The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 

accumulation of money. On the contrary 
He explicitly commended it. He told the 
story of a great lord going into a far coun- 
try and giving to his servants money to 
use in his absence ; to one five talents, to 
another two, to another one, to every man 
according to his several ability : when he 
returned he commended the servant who 
out of the five talents had made five more, 
and the servant who out of the two talents 
had made two more, and condemned the 
servant who had done nothing to increase 
the store with which he was intrusted. We 
have very properly spiritualized this para- 
able and interpreted the word talent so as 
to include all the individual's powers and 
opportunities ; but primarily a talent was a 
piece of money, and the primary significa- 
tion of the parable is that the accumulation 
of money, if inspired by a right motive and 
directed to a right end, is not only legiti- 
mate but praiseworthy. 

But Christ did vigorously condemn the 
notion that money or the things which 



The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 1 85 

money will obtain are to be valued for 
their own sake. He condemned the spirit 
which accumulates wealth for the mere 
sake of enjoying the possession of it. He 
rebuked hoarding : " Lay not up for your- 
selves/' He said, " treasures upon earth, 
where moth and rust doth corrupt, and 
where thieves break through and steal." 
The man who had such plenteous har- 
vests that he knew not what to do with 
them and resolved to build bigger barns 
in which to store them that he might 
have plenty for his own enjoyment, — the 
prototype of whom is found in our time in 
the man whose chief problem is how to in- 
vest his constantly growing wealth, — Christ 
called a fool. He put before his hearers a 
curious problem, which the American world 
would do well to consider : " What shall 
it profit a man if he shall gain the whole 
world and lose his own life? " What profit 
if he can buy pictures, but has never devel- 
oped the art capacity to enjoy them? 
Books, but never has developed the literary 



186 The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 

taste for reading? Means for travel, but 
never has acquired the largeness of life 
which travel can confer ? Every luxury of 
the table, but has become a dyspeptic so that 
he can eat only the plainest and simplest 
of fare ? The secret of happiness, Christ 
said, is in character, — in what one is, not 
in what one has : " Blessed are the poor 
in spirit, the meek, the merciful, the pure 
in heart, the peacemakers.' ' The secret of 
power, He said, is in spiritual endowment 
and in the self-sacrifice which accompanies 
it, and to this endowment of the spirit His 
disciples were to look for their power to 
move the world : " Ye shall receive power," 
He said, " after that the Holy Spirit is 
come upon you." To His own cross He 
looked for the secret of His own power in 
human mastery : " I, if I be lifted up, 
will draw all men to Me." According to 
Jesus Christ neither the secret of pleasure 
nor the secret of power is to be found in 
the acquisition of wealth. It is the posses- 
sion of character which may profitably use 



The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 187 

wealth as a tool but which must always dis- 
pense with it when it becomes a burden. 

The other principle which Jesus Christ 
inculcated is expressed in the sentence, 
" He that is greatest among you shall be 
your servant." As material things are 
divinely intended to minister to life, so life 
itself is intended as an opportunity for serv- 
ice. And this service of man by his fel- 
low man is not something incidental, some- 
thing to be rendered in the leisure hours 
and in the chance opportunities. Life is 
divinely organized for mutuality of service, 
and he only understands its true meaning 
who can use it for this divine end. 

Naked we came into the world, and we 
are housed, clothed, and fed only as by our 
industry we provide the necessaries of life, 
or by the industries of others they are pro- 
vided for us. Nature does not give us 
something for nothing. When we ask her 
for bread, she bids us earn it. Our heavenly 
Father feeds us, not as the mother bird feeds 
the little birds, by putting the food into our 



188 The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 

open mouths, but by putting brains into 
our heads and muscles into our bodies, and 
bidding us get food for ourselves. He puts 
Adam into the garden to dress and to keep 
it, and what man gets from his garden de- 
pends on the fidelity with which he dis- 
charges the trust reposed in him. The raw 
material must be won by force or blandish- 
ment from the reluctant earth ; it must be 
converted from raw material into finished 
produce ; it must be carried from the place 
where it has been created to the commu- 
nity in which it is needed ; and in that com- 
munity it must be brought to the indi- 
viduals who need it, or brought where they 
can come and find it. Thus agriculture, man- 
ufactures, transportation, are essential to life. 
But more than these are essential. The 
body must be kept in order and put in 
order when it becomes deranged : there 
must be physicians. The members of this 
Commonwealth must understand their right 
relations to each other, and these must be 
studied, understood, maintained : there 



The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 189 

must be lawyers. The intellectual life of 
man asserts itself and its needs : there must 
be authors, teachers, musicians, artists. 
Reverence must be cultivated, love devel- 
oped, the moral principles of life elucidated 
and applied, and the spiritual brotherhood 
of men expressed in acts both of charity and 
worship : there must be priests and prophets 
of the religious life. And these latter, that 
minister to mind and spirit — are more neces- 
sary under liberty than under despotism, be- 
cause the fraternity is voluntary not compul- 
sory, and the higher relationships are left de- 
pendent on the good-will of man to his fel- 
low men. Finally, there must be homes, 
where workers will be rested and refreshed 
for to-morrow's labor, and children will be 
reared to continue in future generations 
the tasks begun by them. Here wives and 
mothers will be ministering to life at its very 
source and fountain, and preparing for the 
ages after they themselves have gone to 
their rest. Thus regarded, society is seen to 
be as truly an organism under democracy as 



190 The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 

under monarchy, under a free brotherhood 
as under state socialism. Every man is 
the servant of his fellow men and he is the 
greatest who serves most. 

In the human hive there are some drones 
— idle, useless, good-for-naughts. Whether 
they be idle rich or idle poor, they are 
equally good-for-naughts. He who tramps 
the road in soleless shoes, and he who rides 
by in coach and four, are equally vaga- 
bonds, if the spirit and intent is the same — 
idle pleasure-seeking — though one is called 
a tramp and the other a tourist. Tramping 
and traveling are equally legitimate for a 
summer rest, and equally illegitimate for a 
life employment. In truth, one may well 
have pity for the idle poor, but can have 
only contempt for the idle rich. The idle 
poor man has had a hard time in life ; he 
has, perhaps, been led to think that the 
world owes him a living ; he has seen his 
fellows about him working hard and get- 
ting little ; he has, perhaps, had the same 
experience himself ; possibly the little work 



The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 191 

he had has been taken from him, he cannot 
tell how or why ; he has become discour- 
aged ; he thinks he has proved that for him 
industry does not pay ; to beg is easier than 
to work, and the work that he can do is 
honored by society scarcely more and re- 
warded rather less than beggary. We may 
palliate the offense when such a one sinks 
into idleness. But there is no such excuse 
for the idle son of the rich man. He has 
been born in surroundings which declare to 
him the profitableness of labor ; he has had 
the advantages of a good education ; he 
possesses wealth, which is itself a power in 
the industrial world ; if he does not need to 
labor in order to earn his daily bread, so- 
ciety has great need of his labor in indus- 
tries which do not produce bread. If such 
a man is idle — and many such idlers there 
are — for him there is no excuse ; for such 
idleness there is no palliation. He richly 
deserves the contempt of all honorable men. 
In the Commonwealth every man is de- 
pendent upon his fellow men ; every voca- 



192 The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 

tion which contributes to the common wel- 
fare is honorable ; every life which draws 
something from the common stock and 
adds nothing to it is dishonorable. Service 
is the true standard of life ; and he is truly- 
greatest who renders the greatest service. 

I am unwilling to bring this series of 
lectures to a close without addressing a few 
special words to these young men of the 
Divinity School for whose benefit this 
course of lectures has been especially de- 
signed. This is the more important because 
there is a possibility that they may think 
that I desire to divert their energies from 
the special work of the Gospel ministry ; 
that I wish to substitute for the Gospel of 
Jesus Christ a different message. The min- 
ister makes a great mistake if he turns aside 
from his special work to give lectures on 
the Evolution of Industry, or on Political 
Reform, or on social and political problems, 
or even on purely ethical questions. The 
Church is not a school of political science 



The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 193 

or of social reform, or of ethical culture. It 
is a ministry to the religious life of men. 
It is intrusted with a Gospel message which 
it must never forget ; and if for that mes- 
sage it substitutes lectures on Politics, So- 
ciology, or Ethics, it substitutes the lesser 
for the greater, the temporal for the eternal. 
But it is of the first importance that the 
Church understands what its Gospel mes- 
sage is. It certainly includes if it is not all 
comprised in Christ's definition of His own 
mission in His first sermon at Nazareth : 
" The spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because 
He hath anointed Me to preach the gospel 
to the poor ; He hath sent Me to heal the 
broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the 
captives, and recovering of sight to the 
blind, to set at liberty them that are 
bruised, to preach the acceptable year of 
the Lord." The preacher is to look about 
him in his community ; he is to take cog- 
nizance of the poor, the broken-hearted, the 
captives, the blind, the bruised ; he is to 
bring a message which will be glad tidings, 



194 The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 

and healing, and deliverance, and recover- 
ing of sight, and liberty to them. If this 
message involves an understanding of 
political conditions and a condemnation of 
political methods ; if it involves a study of 
social and industrial conditions and a com- 
prehension of social and industrial methods ; 
if it involves an understanding of popular 
ethical standards and a condemnation of 
them because they are unchristian, he is 
not to think that he is laying aside his 
legitimate work in entering upon these 
fields of human thought and life. When 
John the Baptist in prison, sent to inquire 
whether Jesus was the Messiah, it is said 
that Jesus for answer cured many infirmi- 
ties and plagues and cast out evil spirits, 
and unto many that were blind He gave 
sight, and then said to the messengers, " Go 
your way and tell John what things you 
have seen and heard ; how that the blind 
see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, 
the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the 
poor the glad tidings is preached." He 






The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 195 

whose ministry has not in it something of 
analogous effect may well donbt whether he 
is preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 
The minister on Sunday leads his congrega- 
tion in the prayer " Thy Kingdom come, 
Thy will be done, on earth as it is in 
heaven." He is not departing from his 
divine mission if after this prayer he at- 
tempts to show his people what they must 
do to accomplish that will and to hasten 
that kingdom in their own time and in 
their own community. He has, or ought 
to have, the prophetic vision of John who 
saw the kingdoms of this world become the 
kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, 
and he is not departing from his appointed 
mission in order to preach politics if he is 
so presenting the law of Christ as the stand- 
ard of life, and so imparting the power of 
Christ as the secret of life as to infuse the 
republic in which he lives with the Christ- 
life and bring it politically, socially, and 
ethically nearer the Kingdom of God. It 
is not necessary that the minister should 



196 The Ethical Solution — Regeneration 

know and teach what specific action the 
government should take to control great 
industrial organizations, but it is necessary 
that he should know and teach that govern- 
ment is a divine organization and that the 
real rights of all the people are superior to 
the supposed interests of any class. It is 
not necessary that he should be the advo- 
cate of any particular social or industrial 
reform, such as cooperation or profit-shar- 
ing, but it is necessary that he should know 
and teach that industry is not a form of 
war, but a form of mutual cooperative serv- 
ice. It is not necessary that he should 
know or teach what are the ethical rules 
which should be prescribed for the regula- 
tion of any specific industry, but it is neces- 
sary that he should know and teach that 
the Ten Commandments and the Golden 
Rule are not reverenced by being put be- 
hind the altar in golden letters to be looked 
at ; they are reverenced only when they are 
carried out in practical application to our 
complex social and industrial life. 



